We asked, you told us: This is the sound profile you primarily use on your phone

Smartphones these days do so much more than just make and receive calls. Most of us escape into our phones for instant messaging, media consumption, surfing the web, or just aimlessly scrolling through social media. But when a call actually comes through, does your phone ring?

We recently conducted a poll on our website asking our readers about their preferred sound profile on their phones. Here’s are the results of that poll.

What sound profile do you primarily use on your phone?

Results

As you can see from the chart above, most of our readers — 48.3% of the 1,426 respondents — prefer to keep their phones on ringing mode.

Meanwhile, 31.3% of the voters choose to keep their phones on vibrate and 14.8% have their phones set on silent mode.

A small percentage of the respondents (2.6%) leave their devices on Do Not Disturb mode that companies like Apple and OnePlus facilitate through alert sliders.

3% of the voters also chose the “other” option in our poll. They left comments under our poll article to tell us exactly what custom sound profiles they use.

Here’s what our poll takers had to say.

Your comments

DBS: Well… It’s A PHONE, so seems kinda dumb to have the ringtone off. I keep it on and then have DND programmed for my bedtime so I don’t even need to bother messing with sound profiles, ever. If I have a meeting and I really can’t be interrupted, my phone is turned off.

Madhur Tewani: I leave the phone on DND with multiple rules scheduled based on the day of the week and time of the day. Primarily to not get bugged by conversations from non-starred contacts and non-conversation notifications.
Calls and conversations are always on ring from starred contacts, sometimes even the calls from unknown callers are on ring.

EeZeEpEe: Ringtone on except when at work I have it silent and let my watch alert me of messages and phone calls.

Hutcb21: I use Bixby routines to mute my phone at night, set it to vibrate for working hours, and set the sound for the rest of my waking hours, then further routines alter the volume depending on certain conditions such as location or connection to a certain Wi-Fi network.

Thelonius: I leave my phone on vibrate since it’s always on me and I have a smartwatch that gets notifications anyway. Most of my day is spent at work or in a room with at least one other person so having my ringtone on would just be obnoxious. I really only have sound notifications turned on when I’m expecting a time-sensitive/important message or phone call. I set my phone to silent before bed. I also have a 3 stage alert slider, making switching profiles super easy. IDK why every phone doesn’t have one. In the US it’s really only Apple and Oneplus.

paulius: My phone is always on vibrate only and I usually don’t feel it, but I have a Samsung Band that vibrates with important notifications.

Robert John Hebert: Silent when the sun doesn’t shine on me. Very short single “ding” during the day. My watch vibrates.

Sanket Prabhu: Being an Insurance Sales Adviser I tend to Keep my Phone on temporary mute during meetings. For the night, I set Bixby routine for vibration mode. Apart from this, the phone is on custom ringtone rest of the day.

thesecondsight: All my ringtones are customized. Some are songs from my eclectic collection of music over the years. Some are musical scores from video games or movies. Some are even quotes from favorite books. I create all my ringtones with the audio-editor/recording tool Audacity and Linguatec Voice Reader, a text-to-speech application. There’s no reason why ringtones have to be dull and boring.

EasyCare: I leave it with a ringtone on. I now mostly only get phone calls from couriers or food delivery. I also ensure notifications only sound from the ones I care for. If I need some quiet time, I turn on timed DND. I find it strange for someone to silence a communication device by default without clear reason.

2Star Hoodlum: My device is for media consumption first and a phone second. Silent and very occasionally on vibrate, there’s rarely any situation that needs my attention immediately.