Do emergency alerts respect volume/vibration settings? Should they?

bookreader

Well I sure as hell wouldn't want my phone freaking out because some useless government alert came in.

However having said that, the only way I've been able to kill those government alerts from causing annoyance is to completely disable the government alert receiver.

Open_Source_Enjoyer

bookreader Well I sure as hell wouldn't want my phone freaking out because some useless government alert came in.

However having said that, the only way I've been able to kill those government alerts from causing annoyance is to completely disable the government alert receiver.

You can dissable these alerts if you worry more about your phone freakign out then the alert.
But I think nobody should dissable these alerts.

TRInvictus

Hi @NuclearMaze

A few days ago, I set up my smartwatch to sync with the phone. My phone is muted, vibrate off, DND on, so I'd expect that it would be completely quiet. When I started "search my phone" on the watch, the phone did vibrate and loudly played sound. Thats not an emergency alert, but a function triggered through the watch on the companion app on the phone. But every setting on the phone (see above) seem to be ignored. I have to double check if there is something special granted to the app, allowing it to make all that noise in DND etc...

TRInvictus

Ok, the app has all notifications off, but it does vibrate and play sound, even they're all off (permission not granted).
When granted, there's a dedicated "find my phone" notification permission to enable/disable.

I mean, "find my phone" is certanly useful, even when DND is on, as, well, it helps you find the phone. But how come it can vibrate and play sound when permission is not granted? It's a user app, and not a sys component as the emergency alerts are...

NuclearMaze

That's funny, my Garmin smartwatch has a "find my phone" feature as well and sure enough, despite my phone being set up to be silent, the watch (via the companion app) can make it vibrate and play a sound at max volume.

That makes "extreme" emergency warnings being silent even more curious.
I guess my old Nord on Linage (Android 12 based) behaving exactly the same might somewhat point to an upstream and/or implementation issue?

TRInvictus

NuclearMaze Absolutely, curious to know how an app is able to make such a noise with no (obvious) permissions granted...?

NuclearMaze

Still curious to learn if the described behaviour is intended, hope it's okay to bump after 2 months.

WestQuester

I would like to know as well. Had a tornado come near my house and phone was in Do Not Disturb mode. The alert showed up silently and I can find no way to make it play an audible alert that overrides DND. So now I have to sleep with my phone buzzing with notifications during the night.

I had an Amber alert come through with sound and all when DND was off so I know the audible alert works normally.

The Garmin watch paired with it plays sound alerts for Find My Phone even when in DND so perhaps it's a different sound channel.

But it's a pretty serious issue and I don't know if that's a Pixel, an ASOP, or GOS problem. I assumed it would just like all the other phones I've ever had but apparently not. Regardless, this could cause people to die if they trust their phone to alert them and it won't.

GrapheneOS

Yes, they currently respect the volume settings as they do in the stock OS.

WestQuester

Thank you for that confirmation. Must be an AOSP problem then. It's concerning.

cupcake-alibi

(slightly off topic) if you have airplane mode enabled and no sim card, can you still receive emergency alerts?

de0u

cupcake-alibi I am unaware of any credible evidence or credible source contradicting the project's statement that airplane mode on a current Pixel device stops the cellular modem from receiving and sending.

My understanding is that wireless emergency alerts are sent by cellular sites.

So I would say "no".

There are sources online that claim airplane mode does not stop the cellular modem from receiving or transmitting. Some of them mention non-Pixel phones from 10 or more years ago that were individually infected with malware by intelligence agencies. And it's possible that somewhere there is evidence of malfeasance by modern Pixel devices. But until there is, I would stick with "no" as my answer to your question.