The iPhone has a “silent” switch on the left side. This is a physical switch that mutes the phone ringer text message notifications, new mail notifications, calendar alarms, etc. That might convince you that with the switch in the “silent” position, you can safely use your iPhone in a place where noise-making is unacceptable.
Don’t.
Many applications, including Apple-made applications, simply ignore this switch, and will gladly send their noises to the external speaker, angering everyone on the plane, or waking your sleeping wife (this one actually happened to me). The only safe way to silence the iPhone is to enable the “silent” switch and plug in some headphones.
Here are the Apple applications that ignore the switch:
- Timer (Clock app)
- Alarm (Clock app)
- iPod
- YouTube
- Texas Hold’em
Here are some of the third party applications that ignore the switch:
- At Bat (MLB)
- Tap Tap Revenge
- Phone Saber
- Chopper
- Pandora
- AOL Radio
I’m willing to let the Timer/Alarm functions in the Clock app slide as exceptions. Alarms (and timers) are alarms, and they’re meant for waking people up. You don’t want to miss a flight because your alarm didn’t go off. But why do the YouTube and iPod apps make noise? Sure, there may not be many uses for watching them without sound, but consider that unless you quickly yank your headphones out of the jack, the “play/pause” functionality can be accidentally tiggered as the contacts are bridged, and the iPod application will start blasting out music. And there’s absolutely no excuse for the Texas Hold’em app to be making noise with the “silent” switch enabled.
I’m torn as to the proper solution to this problem. After all, I don’t think it is even possible for Mac OS X applications to make noise while audio output is muted (unless they directly manipulated the setting). So why shouldn’t the switch disable external audio output at the OS level? The only problem with doing that is the Alarm/Timer functionality. Perhaps there should be two ways to send external audio: the normal way (which the OS governs, using the “silent” switch), and the “emergency” way, which ignores the switch. It should be clear the the “emergency” way is only to be used for alarm type things that would be noticeably neutered if they had to obey the switch.
What other applications ignore this switch? Have you been embarrassed by unexpected iPhone noises?
13 Comments
I think Apple actually calls it a “ringer” switch, so, technically, all it should be muting is the ringer. But I agree that it should be a general “mute” switch, with the exception of things like alarm.
I was terribly surprised by the Alarm that went off in a meeting. But it really does make sense: by setting an alarm you are asking to be interrupted no matter what.
It comes in especially handy at night — if you leave your iPhone on — since the new push email can “ding” throughout the night as you receive messages.
As you say, no other apps shoudl ignore the switch. I would hope that Apple implemented the alarm function so that an application has to override the default behavior, and these other apps chose to override for whatever (poor) reason.
What I’d love to see in the Calendar app:
* Vibrate-only alarms that only vibrate, regardless of phone setting.
* Ignore-silence alarms that will ring no matter how the phone is set.
* Alarm repeat: if the alarm is not acknowledged, it will ring again in X minutes, repeating this up to Y times.
* Support for properly copying an event’s color, based on the Mac/MobileMe calendar color. (Instead, it simply chooses colors from a rotating palette, meaning you’re probably going to get different colors on your iPhone than you get on your iCal and MobileMe.
I’d file a bug.
Matt, Apple calls it the “Ring/Silent” switch. And even if they mean “Ring/No-ring”, it is standard phone/pda behavior that this switch silences all external audio output. Why would you want to silence the ringer, but not games? The point of the switch is to prevent embarrassment. It fails at that.
Where do I file a bug? Anyone have a contact at Apple? To me, this is a major, major bug.
Send an e-mail to Steve Jobs. He staff has been known to bubble important issues up to the top. We’ll see. This is a major bug for me… I’m afraid to bring my iPhone to any place where audio output might be embarrassing. I can’t count on the Ring/Silent switch to save me from embarrassment, so I just have to shut the whole thing off.
From the iPhone User Guide (Basics > Ring/Silent Switch):
So, it does seem that everything should be silenced. I think this is more something to do with App developers (including Apple, I guess) that aren’t checking if the Silent switch is activated before playing sounds.
Yeah, but it seems strange to require developers to check the setting. Why not just enforce it in the OS?
I made a bug for this exact problem on the ADC site: 6083228. I linked to this post for the piece out of the documentation which says how it should work.
You guys should do the same here:
https://bugreport.apple.com/
I have the opposite problem…my text message noise will not go off when on normal (not silent) so sometimes I don’t even notice I got a text when my phone is right next to me…my settings all say on…any help???
It would be nice to have an alarm application that could play a song from the iPhone as the alarm. Maybe this functionality should be built into the iPod app?
But what do you do when you want to drop your iPhone by your bedside when you climb into bed with your mate?
Flick the ringer switch to off.
Go to Settings>Sound.
Turn all vibrates to off.
Slide volume to zero.
and Plug something in to your headphone jack for good measure.
That’s a lot of work!
Can some one make an application that will bring us silence automatically? Apple?!
This is how it suppose to be. Turning off phone ringer doesn’t mean that alarm is off too. At nights I don’t want to be bothered by the phone so I turn off the ringer but I still need the alarm to wake up. This is a normal use case. If you think this is a bug then it is people like you that we have horrible design cell phones. You tube and other apps have nothing to do with the switch.
Can i programatically check that iPhone is in Silent Mode or Ring mode, if it is possible, then any hint or any idea that how can we check?
Thanx
aman, read it again. I don’t have a problem with the alarm being unaffected. It’s games and the video player that don’t make sense. If you don’t want the ringer to make sound, you don’t want games or video to make sound either.
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