Mr. Silent: turn on silent mode automatically on Android
If you are the type of person who enables silent mode, either vibration or complete silence, on your phone usually when you get out or to specific places and locations such as work, the cinema or a crowded restaurant, you may want to use automation instead to avoid situations where you forget to silence your phone.
While some smartphone owners do not seem to have issues with it, some even seem to embrace loud phone conversations or music that plays so loud that everyone around hears it as well, it may be an unpleasant experience for others.
I fall into the second group of users, as I dislike it a lot when my smartphone starts to play a ringtone or music suddenly while I'm in public.
Mr. Silent is a new application for Android that you can use to create rules when you want your phone to be silenced by it.
The application features four different options in this regard:
- Time Slot - Configure the app to silence the phone once or regularly by specifying time and date in the app. You can silence your phone each night when you go to bed, silence it for an event that is about to happen such as going to the cinema or meeting friends at a bar, or during your commute to work.
- Events - This is similar to the time slot feature, but limited to events. This may include meetings or other events picked up by your phone's calendar.
- Contacts - This feature enables you to blacklist contacts. When a contact that is on the blacklist calls, your phone will go silent automatically.
- Locations - Add latitude and longitude of locations to turn your phone silent whenever you reach a selected radius. This can be useful to silence your phone when you arrive at work for example.
The rules are easy to setup with the location-based rules probably the most time consuming of them all. You can display a map in the application to pick a place this way so that you don't have to look up latitude and longitude using a different application.
The feature that I like the most is the time-based rule option. I can turn my phone silent at night, and also at specific hours of a work week, for instance when I'm out of house.
You can swipe to the right to display settings and all configured rules. Settings include an option to switch between silent mode and vibrate, and the location update interval (every 30 seconds by default).
Conclusion
Mr. Silent is a neat application for Android 2.2 and up. It requires quite a few rights though which seem -- at least for the most part -- necessary for its functionality.
Thanks for the tip Martin.
It is for these kinds of posts that I follow GHacks.
What’s up with the generic comment, are you a bot?
2G?
Where on the planet is that still in use? I was forced to give up using my RAZRV3 years ago because 2G was phased out by AT&T.
Everywhere 3G has been turned off and you don’t have LTE coverage, and believe me there are many developed countries where this is the case and if it weren’t for 2G you wouldn’t even be able to make a phone call.
Maybe I missed it, but I don’t believe tha term “2G” is in the article. Perhaps you are referring to “AGM G2”??
@Martin
Your website has gone insane.
When I the post button I then saw my comment posted on a different article page. When I opened this article again, it is here.
@Tachy @Martin Brinkmann
” Your website has gone insane. ”
Same here. Has happened several times.
@Tachy,
@Martin P.,
For over two weeks now,
I’ve been seeing “Comments” posted by subscribers appearing in different, unrelated articles.
https://www.ghacks.net/windows-11-update-stuck-fixed-for-good/#comment-4572991
https://www.ghacks.net/windows-11-update-stuck-fixed-for-good/#comment-4572951
For the time being,
it would be better to specify the “article name and URL” at the beginning of the post.
@tachy a lot of non-phone devices with a sim in them rely on 2G, at least here in europe.
Usually things reporting usage or errors/alarms on something remote that does not get day to day inspection in person. They are out there in vast numbers doing important work. Reliable, good range. The low datarate is no problem at all in those cases.
3G is gone or on its last legs everywhere, but this stuff still has too much use to cancel.
Anyhow, interesting that they would put that in. I can see the point if you suspect a hostile 2G environment (amateur eavesdroppers with laptop, ranging up to professional grade MITM fake towers while “strangely” not getting the stronger crypto voip 4G because it is being jammed, and back down to something as old ‘stingray’ devices fallen into the wrong hands).
But does this also mean that they have handled and rolled out a fix for that nasty 4G ‘pwn by broadcast’ problem you reported earlier this year? I had 4G disabled due to that, on the off chance that some of the local criminals would buy some cheap chinese gear, download a working exploit and probe every phone in range all over town in the hope of getting into phones of the police.
>”While most may never be attacked in stingrays, it is still recommended to disable 2G cellular connections, especially since it does not have any downsides.”
The downside would be losing connectivity. I spend a lot of time way out in the countryside where there’s often no service or almost none. My network allows 2G, and I need it sometimes. I have an option on the phone to disable 2G, I may do that when I’m in the city and I have good 5G connectivity, but not out in the country.
I would imagine that the stingray exploits, like most of the bad things in this world, are probably things you will run into in the crowded big cities.
I stopped using it in a mobile (Wi-Fi line) environment, so I’m almost ignorant of the actual situation,
But the recent reality in Japan makes me realize that “the infrastructure of the web is nothing more than a papier-mâché fiction”.
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/17/google-chrome-to-enable-https-first-by-default-for-all-users/#comment-4572402
It is already beyond the scope of what an individual can do.
What we should be aware of is the reality that “governments and those in power want to control the world through the Web”, and efforts to counter (resist and prevent) such ambitions are necessary.
Why do you want people to disable the privacy features? Hmmmmm?
Now You: do you plan to keep the Ads privacy features enabled?
I’d like to tell you, but apparently if you make a post critical of Google, you get censored. * [Editor: removed, just try to bring your opinion across without attacking anyone]
@Martin
You website is still psychotic. Comments attach to random stories.
@Martin please do fix the comments, it’s completely insane commenting here! :[
@Martin
The comments are seriously messed up on gHacks now. These comments are mixed with the article at the below URL.
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/18/android-how-to-disable-2g-cellular-connections-to-improve-security/
And comments on other articles are from as far back as 2010.
What does this article has anything to do with all the comments on this article? LOL I think this Websuite is ran by ChatGPT. every article is messed up. Some older comments from 2015 shown up in recant articles, LOL
The picture captioned “Clearing the Android Auto’s cache might resolve the issue” is from Apple Carplay ;)
How about other things that matter:
Drop survival?
Screen toughness?
Degree of water and dust protection?