#How to turn an iPhone’s ringer on

#Foreword: Missed calls

Today I had a delivery scheduled for a piece of furniture, so I had my iPhone’s ringer on. This is pretty unusual for me; my policy is that if you want to get on the phone with me, you need to either tell me in advance when you’ll call or be in my contacts. Otherwise, unknown numbers are silenced.

I don’t think this pattern of phone usage is that unusual. A 2025 Pew survey survey found that 68% of adult Americans get scam calls at least weekly and 31% of Americans get scam calls daily. Here’s a Redditor who received 47 scam calls in a single day, and lots of the replies are from people who have settled on my strategy as well:

i do not have a landline and my cellphone only rings for numbers in my contact list.

If I know the caller, they’re on my contacts list. If they’re calling from an unfamiliar number for some reason, they’ll leave a message and I’ll call right back.

I don’t answer unless I know who’s calling.

I don’t answer my phone, so it’s not an issue.

Sometimes, though, you do need to answer a phone call from a stranger. Maybe you have a bulky delivery scheduled, like me. Perhaps you’re waiting on a call from a potential employer. Or you could be waiting to hear the results of a medical test. Something all of these situations have in common is that missing the phone call has consequences.

So you turn your ringer on. How hard could it be?

#Settings that control iPhone call notifications

I’d been burned before, so after I turned my ringer on, I went to Settings → Apps → Phone and disabled Silence Unknown Callers. Do you know what happened next? After work, I noticed a notification for a missed call. It turns out there’s way more settings that can silence calls than I thought. Here’s a list of as many as I can find. If you learn about more settings, please let me know and I can add them here.

Please note that this article does not cover turning an iPhone’s ringer off, which irritatingly involves a slightly different list of settings. For example, in the Contacts app you can add individual contacts to an “Emergency Bypass” list which causes calls from those contacts to always ring audibly.

#The physical silence switch

On the side of the phone is a physical switch to silence notifications and calls (and also, like, sound effects in games? I don’t really know why it does double-duty like this). Make sure that’s not set to “silent”.

#Settings → Sounds & Haptics

Set the Ringtone and Alerts volume to the maximum (or whatever you want). If vibration is important as well, set Haptics to Always Play.

If you have Change with Buttons enabled, you can use the physical volume up button to change the ringtone volume. Make sure that’s not silent either!

If Change with Buttons is not enabled, then the physical volume buttons will have no effect on the ringtone volume. Many users find this unintuitive, to say the least.

I saw someone say to make sure you have a sound assigned to Ringtone, but I couldn’t see a way to not have a sound assigned, so that might be a relic from a previous iOS version.

#Settings → Apps → Phone

Set Silence Unknown Callers to Off.

Under Call Blocking & Identification, set Silence Junk Callers to Off.

Under Blocked Contacts, make sure the phone number you’re expecting a call from (lol, lmao, they never tell you ahead of time) isn’t present.

Also, make sure that Call Forwarding is set to Off, although that setting doesn’t exist on my phone.

I saw someone online say that they needed to set Announce Calls to Always, but I think that setting just makes Siri read information about the incoming caller out loud and it’s not actually related to the ringer (I tested this).

#Do Not Disturb

Open the Control Center and make sure Do Not Disturb is not enabled. You should see a gray button that says “Focus” with a gray moon icon next to it. If Do Not Disturb is enabled, the button will say “Do Not Disturb” and have a blue moon icon next to it.

If it’s in a different focus mode, you may want to disable that. Focus modes can be customized under Settings → Focus:

Note that focus modes (including Do Not Disturb) can be activated automatically on a schedule, so make sure that no focus modes will be enabled while you’re waiting for a call. In particular, the Sleep focus mode is automatically activated if you have a sleep schedule set in the Clock app under the Alarms tab. The Sleep focus mode schedule will show up in the settings like the other focus modes, though, so you don’t need to go to the Clock app specifically to turn it off.

#Settings → Screen Time → Communication Limits

Set During Screen Time to Everyone. Set During Downtime to Everyone.

#Settings → Face ID & Passcode → Attention Aware Features

Make sure that Attention Aware Features is disabled. If these are enabled, your iPhone may silence calls if it notices you looking at it (!!!!!).

#Settings → Accessibility → Touch → Call Audio Routing

Under the Touch section, for some fucking reason, you can set Call Audio Routing to be “Automatic”, “Bluetooth Headset”, or “Speaker”. If you will not hear your phone’s speaker, or if you will not hear a connected Bluetooth headset, pick the other option.

Also under Call Audio Routing, set Auto-Answer Calls to Off. (Why is this under “Call Audio Routing”??)

#Settings → Accessibility → Hearing Devices

I think there’s some relevant settings for Hearing Devices, but I don’t have any of those, so I can’t help you here. Here’s a page on using hearing devices from the iPhone User Guide.

#Headset mode

Maybe some phones can get stuck in “headphone mode” or “headset mode”? Unclear. In the Control Center, tap the AirPlay icon and make sure you’re not playing audio to headphones unless you want to be doing that.

#Notification settings on your Mac

In the Settings app on your Mac, under Focus, if you have Share across devices enabled (NB: setting names are lowercase on macOS?), then enabling (e.g.) Do Not Disturb on your Mac will also enable it on your phone.

#Afterword: Build predictable systems

I could say a lot more about this, but I need to feed my cats, so I’ll keep it brief. One of the biggest problems with the status quo here is that it’s not easy to predict if a given call will be silenced or not. You’ve disabled “Silence Unknown Callers”. Will your phone ring when the deliver person calls? Until it happens, there’s no way to know. You should be able to type in a phone number and have your phone tell you if it will ring or not. Nobody should ever be surprised by the behavior of their phone’s ringer.

Also, give me a big button that says “if the ringer does not go off for my next phone call I will do something drastic and unreasonable.” It could even be one of those fancy new Control Center widgets they added in iOS 18. Call me, Apple, let’s link and build this.