I have two friends who call me all the time. I would like to have one set to always have a silent ring so I can easily ignore them, while the other I’d like to assign a custom ringtone. I’m on a Google Pixel phone. Is this possible?
For decades telephones had physical bells, a pair of them, and a tiny clapper that would bounce from side to side, literally “ringing the bells” when someone called. Simple, effective. No surprise that one of the big innovations with mobile phones was different ringtones, something that we were probably all wishing we could have done years earlier, if not that we were limited by the technology itself. Nowadays there’s no “physical” anything, just a tiny speaker, so ringtones can be songs, your dog barking, a baby laughing, or any of hundreds of different preset ringtones. Android’s always been at the forefront of this trend too, and for a while it was quite a trend for people to purchase custom ringtones that were snippets of commercial songs!
At this point in the evolution of Android, there are about 100 different ringtones included with your phone or tablet, and you can pick any of them as your default ringtone and then assign any of the others for specific people. Trying to avoid the in-laws? You can easily pick something ominous to remind you before you tap “Answer”. Love getting calls from your sister, though? Something bright and lively will quickly be associated with her calls and instantly cheer you up (in a rather Pavlovian way, but let’s not dwell on that).
Where this can get a bit confusing to set up is that you don’t make any user changes within the Phone app, but in Contacts. For many users, it might be one of the first times they’ve used the app!
FIND AND LAUNCH “CONTACTS”
If you don’t have the app icon on your home screen, the easiest is to just swipe up from the bottom on the home screen to reveal all installed Android apps. On my Pixel 8a, it looks like this:
You can see it’s a simple, elegant app icon. Tap on it and you’ll be viewing your own contacts list, which might extend to hundreds of entries. This phone is one of my spare numbers and therefore has a contact entry for my main cellphone:
Notice the “Route to voicemail” option: If you really, really don’t want to be bothered by your one friend, you could enable this particular feature and they’ll automatically be routed to voicemail without your phone ever ringing. There’s another way to mute them, however, one that does let you see that they’re calling and answer them if you so choose, but we’ll get to that in a moment.
SETTING CUSTOM RINGTONES IN ANDROID
To access the custom ringtone area, tap on the “•••” button on the top right of the user’s contact record.
Adding a contact to your home screen is a great expert trick; then you have one-button access to the other person via phone, messages, etc. without ever having to open up any apps or use the voice assistant. Quite handy. For our task, however, we want “Set ringtone“.
Since I haven’t chosen a different ringtone, you can see that the default for the Google Pixel 8a is “The Big Adventure”. It works. But this Dave guy? We’re going to assign him a different ringtone. Notice that the categories have varying numbers of matches and that my personal ringtone library has “2 Sounds”. If I tap on that…
Not a lot of exciting choices, but I’ve long since added “None” as a choice by simply creating an empty MP3 file and selecting it. If you have the same, you can choose it to mute your friend without automatically routing them to voicemail. Don’t have this particular ringtone or want a different one? Tap on “+” then read up on Creating Custom Android Ringtones to learn how to proceed.
Now, what about giving Dave a custom, pre-made ringtone? For that I’m going to choose a different category, “Retro Riffs”. Here are some of the 12 great audio snippets in the list:
I can easily assign “Power Up” (a nostalgic Nintendo GameBoy-esque sound) as his ringtone by tapping on it. That’s it. No confirmation, no change in the Contact listing:
Looks just like the earlier Contacts entry, doesn’t it? I really wish there was some sort of visual indicator when you assign a custom ringtone, but maybe that’s a feature for Android 15 or even Android 16. For now, you can easily assign these custom ringtones, as you’ve seen, but you’ll have to do some detective work if you want to see if a contact already has one set or not if you’re thinking about changing it. Have fun and don’t forget you can search for “ringtones” both in the Google Play Store and online to find mp3 and related files suitable for selecting with that “+” button in the My Sounds category!
Pro Tip: There are lots of ways to manage your Android devices and ensure the best possible experience. Learn more by checking out my extensive Android help area while you’re here!