Phone Phrustrations
Jan. 24th, 2020 09:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
plonqI like my Samsung Note (I'm still using my venerable Note 5), but there are some irritating design decisions in Android that rear up and annoy me from time to time.
One puzzling, and somewhat vexing design decision was to make it impossible to change your default alarm tone without resorting to third-party tools.
While the alarm tone on my Note is not terrible, I really prefer the one that I used to use on my old S3. I tracked it down in MP3 format recently and imported it to my phone to use as an alarm tone.
The problem is that if I want to use that tone as an alarm, I have to set it manually ever time I set a new alarm.
I finally gave up trying to figure out how to set it as the default on my phone and resorted to sifting through a number of online forums for help. One of the first things I learned is that people have been kvetching about this since 2011, and Google has made no move to fix it. The other thing I learned is that people are terrible about ignoring questions on forums and just posting boilerplate answers.
When somebody would specifically ask how to change the default alarm tone, a mod or administrator would helpfully reply with how to import an MP3 and select it when you set an alarm.
I mentally applauded one poster who asked about it, and when one of the people gave him the boilerplate response, he replied in a rather snippy tone at them for ignoring the entire point of his question. I don't blame him. The expert who replied either didn't bother to read his question, or did not want to just come right out and say, "You can't." One of the other mods on the forum chastised the original poster for his tone, saying it was uncalled for. ("He was just trying to help.")
I disagree. I think the terse response was deserved. This is a ridiculously common practise on far too many online help sites.
- Somebody asks a specific question
- An "expert" replies with a copy/paste for something only tangentially related
Not only does it do a disservice to the original person asking, but it clogs up the search results in Google for others seeking the same information. It is also disrespectful and irritating.
I may explore the third party software later (not sure if the phone needs to be rooted for that), but for now I guess I'll just have to remember to manually change it for each alarm I set.
One puzzling, and somewhat vexing design decision was to make it impossible to change your default alarm tone without resorting to third-party tools.
While the alarm tone on my Note is not terrible, I really prefer the one that I used to use on my old S3. I tracked it down in MP3 format recently and imported it to my phone to use as an alarm tone.
The problem is that if I want to use that tone as an alarm, I have to set it manually ever time I set a new alarm.
I finally gave up trying to figure out how to set it as the default on my phone and resorted to sifting through a number of online forums for help. One of the first things I learned is that people have been kvetching about this since 2011, and Google has made no move to fix it. The other thing I learned is that people are terrible about ignoring questions on forums and just posting boilerplate answers.
When somebody would specifically ask how to change the default alarm tone, a mod or administrator would helpfully reply with how to import an MP3 and select it when you set an alarm.
I mentally applauded one poster who asked about it, and when one of the people gave him the boilerplate response, he replied in a rather snippy tone at them for ignoring the entire point of his question. I don't blame him. The expert who replied either didn't bother to read his question, or did not want to just come right out and say, "You can't." One of the other mods on the forum chastised the original poster for his tone, saying it was uncalled for. ("He was just trying to help.")
I disagree. I think the terse response was deserved. This is a ridiculously common practise on far too many online help sites.
- Somebody asks a specific question
- An "expert" replies with a copy/paste for something only tangentially related
Not only does it do a disservice to the original person asking, but it clogs up the search results in Google for others seeking the same information. It is also disrespectful and irritating.
I may explore the third party software later (not sure if the phone needs to be rooted for that), but for now I guess I'll just have to remember to manually change it for each alarm I set.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-01 08:37 am (UTC)I personally just use one alarm, and I set the time differently based on when I want to... become alarmed. Are you making and deleting a bunch of alarms?
I like how Windows gives you access to the registry when you really want to attempt something low-level like this. I suppose it might be possible in Android to find out where that file is and replace it wholesale, if you have root access (or with enough permission to access that part of the filesystem, which I was able to do on my Note 2.)