Any apps to find your phone if it's on mute?

RandomLegend [He/Him]@lemmy.dbzer0.com to Free and Open Source Software@beehaw.org – 23 points –

My wife and I regularly misplace our phones in the house and we also keep them on mute like 99% of the time.

Are there any apps that allow us to ping the other ones phone audibly despite it being on mute?

One is a oneplus 6t the other a s23 ultra if that makes a difference

EDIT: I found a solution i like; Homeassistant with TTS Notifications. Of couse you can still list some apps and solutions for others to find, but i am happy now!

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Can you not whitelist each other as a contact that will override the mute?

Not quite sure where i would do that in either of those settings.

We don't use the google contacts app and the ones we use don't have anything like that. Settings are pretty convoluted and the search function doesn't help me

Settings > Sounds & Vibration > Do Not Disturb > Select "Favorites" in the drop down under Exceptions.

Then in your contacts app, favorite each other and test it out!

Yeah that doesn't appear to work when you don't use the do not disturb setting. We just turn down the volume

While that's fine, that's not exactly the intended use so that's why you are running into problems as you can't force volume to go up from another phone.

Start putting on DnD instead of lowering your ring volume to zero, and you can make it work.

If you don't want to deviate from your out of the ordinary use case, then your best bet is some parental control app that allows you to view each other's location.

Thanks to another user i got home assistant notifications with TTS running.

So everything can stay muted and i can let the phone talk via home assistant. Neat part is that this works even with both our phones lost and i can just ask my voice assistant where my phone is and it starts speaking

That's definitely another way to get the phone's "voice" across! Glad it worked out for you. No more lost phones!

I disagree. Having your phone on silent isn't an out-of-the-ordinary use.

I despise listening to various pings, but still want my phone to vibrate and the screen to turn on. Most people at work/school do the same.

"Do not disturb" is for specific, short durations, or while you sleep (if you don't turn your phone off).

I should have been a bit more clear, I meant putting your phone on silent and still wanting to be able to call each other / ping each other to make a noise.

THAT use case is pretty rare.

Its probably the "each other" that makes it trickier. I do ping my watch with an audible ring from my watch to find it, even though it's always on silent.

Shit, I didn't know that, thank you for sharing, imma set mine and my wives phones up now.

I have my phone set so that that if people ring twice in quick succession it will still ring even if it's in DND. And that will also work with the Ring function built into GSConnect/KDE Connect. I ring my phone from my laptop, wait a few seconds, then ring again.

So far no one has used it get past my DND.

Interesting approach, we are not in DND mode however... Just muted the sounds 🤔

To add to the other suggestion, you could set your default ringtone to silence, then set a custom ringtone for "priority contacts" so they can actually ring you.

Why not just let call sounds on and the other off? I have the call sound on so I can search for my phone and hear when someone calls me. All other sounds, like notification sounds are off. Nowadays only my parents are calling me, every other person just texts me, so this works for me, but depends on your circumstances.

Tasker task that puts sound on when receiving a txt with some string of words. Should work.

I assume I'd have to create a task that turns up the volume first then. But that should work!

I'll use this approach if I don't find anything else that just works and does this one thing

Consider MacroDroid, which is free if you use no more than 5 macros.

The homeassist app let's you do that.

Yeah we have them both installed... Can you point me to where exactly I can ping?

use the notification service for your phone, on Android set the message to TTS, in the data use the below

ttl: 0 priority: high media_stream: alarm_stream tts_text: HELP, Im lost can you hear me?

Thanks for answering, I didn't see this.

https://www.google.com/android/find/

You can use the play sound button to make it ring

Yeah i specificaly asked this in the foss community because i don't want to use google services for that.

Ah gotcha. I don't know of a foss version but you can use Buzzkill or STFO to make a notification rule that turns up sound for a matching text message or something like that. I.e. send a text "ring my phone" and make a rule for it to do a sound

https://f-droid.org/packages/de.nulide.findmydevice/ might have something

yeah i found that too but i can't get the docker server to run... always get permission errors despite it being in a 1000:1000 directory hmmm...

is it safe to use their server? 🤔

You don't really need the sever at all if you have another phone in your family that can send a text message. Now that I think of it it might not be a bad idea to set up a sever as backup. But the public sever from the developer should be fairly safe to use as well...

I often use my Bluetooth headphones to locate my phone by initiating a 5s timer using Siri