21 Sep 2012
iPhone
iOS
cold callers
block
ringtone
danthenachoman

How to mute cold callers on an iPhone (& selectively turn off vibrate on iOS5+)

Dan just posted about cold-caller woes, and (after my immediate reaction of ‘tee-hee that’s my name in his recents!’) I thought I’d share this iPhone trick I came up with to stop me being interrupted by them. It doesn’t block them as such, but it makes their calls both silent and vibrationless.

  1. First, create a contact called ‘Blocked’ or ‘Cold Callers’ or something. Every time you get a cold call, or one you never want to answer, add that number to this contact (so you have one ‘umbrella contact’ containing all such numbers).
  2. Next, install a silent ringtone on your phone. I’ve made one here you can download and sync to your phone via iTunes (or you can make your own if you know how).
  3. Go to your ‘Cold Caller’ contact in the Contacts app, and if you hit Edit you’ll be able to set Custom Ringtone to the silent one you’ve just installed. Now it won’t ring whenever they call.
  4. But it will still vibrate. To fix this, you first must enable custom vibration patterns for different contacts. Go to Settings > General > Accessibility > Custom Vibrations and turn it on.
  5. Now if you go back to your Cold Caller contact and hit Edit, you’ll be able to set its Custom Vibration to ‘none’.

All you need to do now is keep adding any new numbers you want muted to this contact, and if you’ve done everything right, it will neither ring nor vibrate when they call.

  1. jeevanrai posted this
 
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