I have anxiety and I didn’t mind much when people called me, because I have caller ID, I could just ignore the unknown callers. But then emergency alerts are now a thing in my country and my phone has started to whine and ring multiple times a year, like the end of the world is coming, to tell me a child is missing, or that a big storm is coming. Plus, during the pandemic, my government thought it would be a brilliant idea to send general messages to the public using that emergency system…
The most frustrating part is that I can’t disable nor mute those alerts. My only way not to have my phone blasting the emergency alarm unpredictably, is to mute it permanently. I’m now missing calls but on the positive side, I don’t notice amber and emergency alerts.
I tried disabling them on two phones using Android 11 and 13. I can slide the sliders to “off” but it doesn’t change anything. I also tried to disable them using adb. Alas even if everything is disabled, the phone still blasts the alarm.
Apparently those are mandatory and you’re not supposed to be able to disable them.
If I understand correctly, the alerts can be classified under the different categories listed in the options (amber, extreme threats, etc…) and those can be disabled. However there is a categry called “presidential alerts” and those cannot be disabled.
Lucky for me, my province just blankets everything under “presidential alerts” and so that’s why the sliders don’t do anything in my case. Like… they should, but because my province just sends everything as super mega extreme presidential alerts, the options are useless.
I’m the weird one who puts my phone on loud when I sleep. If anyone is actually calling me and not being marked as spam, it is probably a work or family emergency. Otherwise I just expect a message.
Disaster??? It helped emergency response time, our ability to reach out loved ones across the planet, maintain relationships with people from other points in our lives. I’m sure there are a million more positive phone related things I could list.
I’m so sick of all the negativity on the Internet.
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