This hidden iOS Clock app feature can stop your late night Netflix binge

Anyone who enjoys falling asleep to Netflix or YouTube knows that particular frustration of waking up four episodes deep into a show, completely lost on what actually happened. Some apps have built-in sleep timers, but plenty of the big ones — Netflix included — still don’t offer this feature. Turns out, Apple has quietly tucked away a solution in a place most people would never think to look.

Fall asleep watching shows without waking up three episodes later

That Clock app on your iPhone or iPad has a timer function, obviously. But, as highlighted by TechRadar, there’s a specific setting buried at the bottom of the options that transforms it into a universal sleep timer for any media playing on your device.

Open the Clock app and tap on Timer. From there, tap “When Timer Ends” and scroll past all those ringtone options until you hit the very bottom. You’ll find “Stop Playing” listed there. Select that, and now whenever your timer runs out, whatever’s playing will stop and your device will lock itself.

Set the timer for however long you typically stay awake — 10 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever works — and start your show. When the countdown finishes, any media that you’re playing simply stops.

The point of this is that the next day, you’ll only need to rewind by however long you set that timer, rather than scrubbing through three hours of content trying to find where you dozed off.

Access from Control Center

Once you’ve got the basic trick down, there are a few ways to speed things up for regular use. The Clock app keeps a list of your recently used timers, so you can tap on previous settings instead of manually adjusting the time each night. Labelling your timers helps too — something like “Bedtime” makes it obvious which one has the Stop Playing function attached.

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Control Centre offers another shortcut. Swipe down from the top right corner of your screen, press and hold on an empty area, tap “Add a control,” and find Timer in that list. Once added, you can tap and hold the timer icon, then swipe up or down to adjust the duration without even opening the full app. Just make sure you’ve already set “Stop Playing” as your default timer action beforehand.