macOS Clock alarms via Shortcuts | Generated by AI

Home 2026.06

Here’s the full investigation summary:

What’s happening

macOS 26 Clock.app does NOT read alarms from the plist or SQLite database. The mobiletimerd daemon manages all alarms in-memory and exposes them via XPC at com.apple.MobileTimer.alarmserver. Clock.app only talks to this daemon — never touches the files directly.

What doesn’t work (all tested)

  1. Plist write (~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mobiletimerd.plist) — daemon ignores it. Clock.app shows “No Alarms”.

  2. SQLite write (group.com.apple.mobiletimerd/local.sqlite) — daemon ignores it. Same result.

  3. pyobjc MTAlarmManager.addAlarm_() — XPC connection rejected: "not entitled". Only Apple-signed apps with the com.apple.private.mobiletimerd.alarmserver entitlement can talk to the daemon.

  4. Compiled Swift binary — same "not entitled" error. Code signing doesn’t help without Apple’s private entitlement.

What DOES work

Shortcuts.app has the correct entitlements. The user already has a 中国法定节假日闹钟 shortcut that creates alarms. shortcuts run works.

The fix

The _set_alarm function needs to use Shortcuts.app as the bridge. The approach:

  1. Create a reusable shortcut (e.g. “ww-create-alarm”) in Shortcuts.app that takes hour, minute, and label as input and creates a Clock.app alarm using the MTCreateAlarm intent action.

  2. In _set_alarm, call shortcuts run "ww-create-alarm" --input-path <args>.

The shortcut needs to be created once via the Shortcuts.app GUI (we can guide the user), or we can create a .shortcut file programmatically and import it. The shortcuts CLI supports sign but not import, so the first shortcut creation is a one-time manual step.

Want me to proceed with creating the shortcut and updating alarm.py?

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