The fake infinite scroll on the iPhone alarm app time picker

This week this Reddit post about the time picker inside the iPhones alarm app made the round. It was posted on HN and some old StackOverflow questions like this and this were linked. I didn’t know that the time picker is just a long list. I find it funny, but I can fully understand why one would decide to implement it like this. The overall effort feels so much lower compared to the complexity of the circular logic and is also less error-prone.

I was curious about other apps. It looks like Apple is using this with every date or time picker which is not surprising. Even Google uses a similar behavior. I tested it with a scheduled email in Gmail. There you can select hours and minutes. When you have scrolled to the bottom of the hours, you automatically jump back to the current hour. This does not happen for minutes, however.

I wonder if this is also the reason why audio player apps (thinking about Spotify) only provide fixed values for sleep timer (end of episode, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 60 minutes, etc.). At least it could be.

Since almost all apps implement the date time picker like this I can imagine that all of those companies / developers read the same StackOverflow answer . The user JKvr mentioned in the comments:

This method also screws up the VoiceOver functionality, it will read out “[item] of [NSIntegerMax]”

Which is quite a big downside and has a lot of impact many developers (myself included) would miss. For a company like Apple that always focus on providing a great accessibility this is quite bad.