It’s been so long either they’re too embarrassed to add the feature after all these years or there’s some weird deeply embedded technical obstacle too scary to touch.
I guarantee it's a third option: When Apple has a bizarre, unexplainable limitation, it's because of a highly opinionated hyper-pure UX design decision.
Having multiple timers running is inelegant and sometimes confusing. So instead of giving users any agency in that situation, they just ban the very concept as a whole.
If they feel enough pressure, and they can come up with a satisfactorily simple UX, they will usually eventually fix the hole.
Not ideal, but fairly easy to hand roll this with the new web push notification support. I support it as a component of a site I'm working on.
The main annoying part is iOS PWA's kill their service workers when off screen even when explicitly told not to via the `waitUntil` command, so you need to have a server running which handles keeping track of the ongoing timeouts and calls the push notification endpoints accordingly.
I agree it sucks, but iOS's service worker policy gave me no other option. Every other browser is just fine having the timeout running in the background, and I in fact have both codepaths running simultaneously so any other browser can work offline.
Funny that I provide a fully working code sample of how to do what the parent wants, explain the caveats associated with it, and get downvoted because Apple crippled their service workers... ok then, Hackers.
I think you’re getting downvoted because what you propose isn’t an adequate solution to what people find lacking in the iOS built-in apps. As you say, it sucks.
There's a lot of shit I don't appreciate about Android, but setting as many timers as you want is a total no-brainer.