I get junk calls on my iPhone throughout the night and it wakes me up. I hate it. Is there a way to have the phone automatically mute so I don’t have to remember to turn it off?
You are not the first person to wish there was a magic genie who could mute your phone automatically at night and only ring or give you a notification if it was someone important, not some junk call, not a random person or drunk ex wanting to beg forgiveness. Regular phones don’t have this level of smarts, of course, so an old-school phone plugged into the wall rang whether it was 3pm or 3am, leading to some weird situations and alarming phone calls. I know my reaction to a middle-of-the-night call is always instant anxiety: why is someone calling me so late if it’s not an emergency or crisis??
Fortunately there’s a feature you can enable on your Apple iPhone that covers this exact situation called “Do Not Disturb“. You can specify when it’s on and off and what happens when you’re in do not disturb mode. Better yet, there’s even a tiny little crescent moon icon that shows up on your phone’s top bar to [subtly] remind you that you’re in this mode!
But let’s not talk about it. Let’s check it out!
Go to “Settings” on your iPhone 7, 6s, iPhone 6, whatever ya got. The main screen will look like this:
What you seek is 2/3 of the way down this screen. Find and tap on “Do Not Disturb“.
Now you’ll see all the basic elements of this incredibly useful iOS feature:
By default, it’s off, as you can see above. You can turn on Do Not Disturb, useful for movies, meetings or other times when you want to have a critical call come through (a sick grandparent can reach you, a child can make a panic call) but everyone else is muted. That’d be done by tapping on the on/off slider control adjacent to “Manual“.
What’s far more useful is to set up a sleep time instead, and that’s done with “Scheduled“. Tap on the slider to turn it on (the background of the little “slider” icon turns green) and suddenly it shows start and stop times too:
Midnight might well be later than you’d like Do Not Disturb start on your iPhone, so tap on the From/To times on the screen and you’ll get to a spot where you can fine tune the time range:
You can see I’ve tweaked it to start at 10pm rather than midnight. Useful.
One more setting that you should examine is the “Allow Calls From” feature. By default it allows calls from numbers you’ve added to your Favorites list, as you can see:
You can completely disable it with “No One” as your setting or allow everyone to call (which seems to defeat the purpose of Do Not Disturb on your iPhone, but I guess it’s an option…) You can also set up a group of just late-night-okay callers if you want. And that’s it. Set up your own Do Not Disturb on your iPhone and you should completely stop being woken up late at night from those pesky junk calls!
And don’t forget, we have tons of other iPhone help here on AskDaveTaylor too, if you have more questions!
Thanks Dave for educating me on what my I-Phone is capable of doing for me….your articles are AWESOME and easy to understand for this ole’ grandma!! Hugs.