During a day, there are times when my Android smartphone manages to distract me with notifications from the various apps. I usually either enable Focus mode or just put my phone on silent when I am busy.
Even though Android allows scheduling DND, I have found an app that gives me more control over it. Making it possible for me to make multiple schedules and providing tools to further enhance the experience.
Let's check it out. 😃
Timed Silence: For When You Don't Want To Be Disturbed
The brainchild of Felix Nüsse, Timed Silence is a Kotlin-based app for Android that can manage your smartphone's volume by either muting it, putting it on vibrate, or setting it to ring with sound.
After going through the initial setup, where the app asked me for a range of permissions for it to function properly, I then created a custom schedule to test out how it worked.
The interface felt easy to use, with a pause/play button at the bottom to control the app's activation. I created a new schedule called “Test”, where I set the volume to be silent. There were two pre-created schedules called “Night” and “Day” too.
I then set the starting time as 16:30 and the ending time as 21:00, selecting all days throughout the week. All of it was very effortless to do.
After I was done, I asked a friend for help, making them call me, text me on Telegram, and send me a snap on Snapchat. In all this, I found out that Timed Silence was correctly able to enable DND at the scheduled time, muting notifications from Snapchat.
For the call (cellular) and the text on Telegram, it followed what I have set in the DND settings of my phone, allowing messages and calls from specific numbers to go through and sending audible notifications.
There are a few things that I didn't test out. There is a Calendar integration, where Timed Silence could manage the phone volume according to events, and the Keywords feature, where I could add specific events/keywords to manage the volume.
Sounds pretty handy to automate things!
Similarly, there is a Bluetooth feature for use with wireless BT devices, and Sanity Check which gave me a good amount of control regarding my priority contacts, and other DND settings.
Overall, the app never got in the way, allowed me to do my thing, and made managing my phone's volume easy. I haven't had to think about the app after I set it up; it just works.
Install Timed Silence
The latest release of the app can be found on F-Droid, with the GitHub repo housing the source code and APKs for those interested.
Suggested Read 📖
Sourav Rudra
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