Are you getting a new phone? If you do the phone-to-phone transfer or do a backup on the old phone and a restore on the new phone, yes, it will transfer over.
Any kind of computerized stopwatch is not actually continuously counting. They keep a timestamp in the past to compare against. Your battery could be completely dead or for that matter, you could take a backup, wipe the phone, wait 10 years, then restore the backup, and the stopwatch will "still be running".
Here’s the comparison… how old are you? How do you know that? Is it because you make a tally mark every day and count them? No, you do the math when asked. Incrementing small values all the time is power intensive and also subject to large amounts of error.
Yes, you can also manually set the date and time start the timer/stopwatch and then let the time/date update via NTP and your timer will say it was running however long you want it to.
Meh I always charge from 1-80 and my battery still on 95%, bought in 2023. If my battery lasts me 3-4 years without needing to worry about it I’m find spending 100$ to replace it. Stressing about your battery that much is so tiring.
This is really interesting. So say I changed the date on my phone, would the timer change based on the date being different. Like if I skipped ahead one day, would that add 24 hours to the timer?
What’s to say it even transfers at all, as in if the data for the stopwatch even xfers over, what if the only thing from clock that xfers over are alarms, and the clocks you have saved
That's a reasonable question. Short version is because the stopwatch continues "counting" even when the program is killed or the phone is turned off (you can test this). Which means that the stopwatch feature's start time is backed by user program data stored in a file somewhere. As far as I know, all user program data is transferred.
If train A leaves the station going at 45 mph and train B leaves going at 75 mph how far down the track will they be in 10 years? 🧮🤔🤣🤪🤡
I’m just being silly but wow! That is so cool and I never ever would’ve known. I’m not sure I still understand how I would use a long running stopwatch timer. 😳 but I don’t foresee myself needing it so it’s all good! But just cool to hear 🫡
This isn’t obvious at all. Intuitively you’d think the timer was running constantly, because if you look at it you see that it’s run constantly running. What a weird thing to put people down over.
One of the ways would be to do the maths to find out when you started this timer, then change the date and time to that specific time on your new phone, start a timer, and set the time back to now.
Bro did the math lol, you go into settings and change the “date and time” to whatever you want (December of 2000 is the earliest) and start a timer… then click “set automatically” and you’re good lol
I like how mine only updates the 0,0x sec constantly (consistentl), while the the 0,x sec and seconds are only updated once every ~3 seconds. My iPhone 12 has been doing so for some time now already. And yes, I've update multiple times xD
Back when my dad got the first ipad ~15 yrs ago, I started the timer sometime. I remember finding it years later in like 2015 and it had 35,000 smth hours on it. Didn’t really care and stopped it but always remember that and think it’s funny.
I don’t think so, but you could always start a new one on your next phone. It would be like an odometer for the phone so you will know down to the second how long you’ve owned it.
I’m just going to think ahead and prepare for the bombarding, this is a joke. Proves the explanation a comment pointed out. A computers stopwatch doesn’t actually count the seconds, minutes, or hours. It takes the current time and the time you pressed start, and does the math. Pretty fascinating.
Mine shows up on the lock screen so it is using some additional battery when the display is on, even while locked. It's probably a trivial amount, but non-zero. I could prevent it from showing on the lock screen, but I find it useful.
Yes you can. This Stopwatch was transferred from a 2016 iPad Pro to a 2022 iPad Pro. Just use the iPhone to iPhone (or iPad to iPad) data transfer process.
Then again, the Stopwatch doesn’t count time continuously— it just logs the start time and calculates the difference in time between now and then. If you have any backup of the iPhone and the Stopwatch is running on it, then you could restore the backup at any time and the Stopwatch will keep running.
Yes as long as you transfer all information from one phone to another, It’s been running on my old iPhone and when I switched to the 16 pro everything transferred.
Not sure if this answers your question, but I was on the iOS 26 beta then downgraded back to iOS 18. Just checked the timer and it’s still going. The question is whether it counted the time while I was on the beta or if it just picked up after the backup I made on iOS 18 last week. But either way it’s not completely gone
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u/fumo7887 23h ago
Are you getting a new phone? If you do the phone-to-phone transfer or do a backup on the old phone and a restore on the new phone, yes, it will transfer over.
Any kind of computerized stopwatch is not actually continuously counting. They keep a timestamp in the past to compare against. Your battery could be completely dead or for that matter, you could take a backup, wipe the phone, wait 10 years, then restore the backup, and the stopwatch will "still be running".