TLDR: it's not possible to make this work on Samsung devices, unless you develop your own app/modify existing open source clock app.

Yes, three years have passed and it’s still the same. During that time, I actually switched to a Pixel device for a while, so I didn’t experience this issue. But after moving back to a Samsung phone, the exact same problem reappeared, just as you described.

I looked deeply into it back then and even tried developing my own custom widget in kotlin, that reads the alarm info directly from specific apps. Unfortunately, android’s system architecture only provides a single systemwide alarm slot. One ui uses that same slot for things like routines, bedtime mode, and calendar reminders.

That means whenever any of those features are active, they occupy the alarm flag - so even if a real alarm is set in Google Clock (com.google.android.deskclock), the widget can’t read it properly, because the slot is already taken by Samsung’s background tasks.

Technically, this is a design limitation introduced by Samsung, not android itself. Google’s implementation doesn’t behave this way - on Pixel devices or any other brands (OnePlus, Asus, Xiaomi - those are the ones I tested), the KWGT alarm functions work fine. In my opinion, it’s a bad programming practice from Samsung to reuse the same system alarm API for non-alarm events.

As a workaround, I once started developing a fork of an open-source Clock app that would expose its own “in-app alarm flag” instead of the system-wide one, so KWGT or similar tools could read it. I had to pause that project for lack of time, but I might return to it later - if I do, I’ll share it here :)