via Apple.com
Consider this hypothetical. A dutiful daughter sits at home in her apartment. She shares her streaming accounts with her parents, and they share their cable password with her. She’s gotten them using two-factor authentication, but told the cable company’s website to remember her device, so no text message confirmation should be necessary. She sees no problem in logging in with the cable company to watch Resident Alien, streaming on the Syfy app. It’s a fun show and she was just reading a creepy book and wants a palate cleanser before bed. It’s 2am. She logs in and is met with a horrifying message, “Please enter the code we just texted to your device.” Not her device though, her mom’s. She receives a 2am text from her mom with the code. She had woken her parents up. Feeling guilty, she decides to write a blog post telling people how to set do not disturb on their smartphones.
Not this blog post, though. Because sharing accounts is amoral, taking content from the good corporations who paid to gobble up all the other corporations who made it. Totally not something I would do, dear reader.
Totally.
Anyway, let’s say you want to make sure you can get text messages from your friends and family at night, who may have an emergency, but not random numbers or acquaintances who can deal with their own emergencies at 4am. Both iOS and Android have handy tools for this. The iOS setting used to be a bit more simple, but, since they added different “Focus Modes,” it’s become a bit more complex. Still, once you add it, you can set it and forget it. Here’s how to keep from getting those pesky 2am calls and texts, while still letting important ones through.
Do Not Disturb on iOS
Apple included “Focus Modes” in iOS 15. These replaced the standard “Do Not Disturb” setting with a few others. You could set a focus mode for work, one for sleep, one for driving, etc. These are also tied to your home screens, wallpapers, and other settings. It makes it easy to put your iPhone into “Work mode” so you don’t get messages from friends on Discord, but will see Slack messages. However, these can be a bit more complex to set up, and you basically have to set up some common elements more than once. I’ll run you through how to do it, and from there, you can figure out the rest.
Setting Up a Sleep Focus
Using sleep as the example again, in part because it has more complexities related to alarms and Apple’s sleep tracking. Other modes, like Do Not Disturb, are a bit less complex.
- Open Settings
- Scroll down and select “Focus”
- Optional: Turn on “Share Across Devices” so you won’t have to set this up on any of your other devices
- Select the type of Focus Mode you want to set. This example will be for “Sleep,” but you could use these instructions to set up the other focus modes as well.
- If you want to add specific people for the focus mode to allow messages from, you can add them individually. Otherwise you can add them by contact type (favorites, family, all contacts, etc) in step 6 below.
- Tap People
- Make sure “Allow Notifications From” is selected
- Tap “Add People”
- Select the contacts you want to add
- Tap Done
- You can also allow calls from your favorites or contacts instead. This can be a lot quicker than selecting individual contacts
- Optional: Enable “Allow Repeated Calls.” If a person really has an emergency, they’ll call more than once. So, if someone calls twice within three minutes, this setting will let the call through, even if they’re not on your allowed call list.
- Now go back to the sleep focus. This is also optional, but if you want sleep focus to automatically turn on at a particular time, this is how you do it:
- Scroll down to “Sleep Schedule”
- You’ll see blue hyperlink text mentioning the “Health App.” Tap that
- Scroll down to “Your Schedule”
- Turn it on, then select a sleep schedule
- Make sure “Use Schedule for Sleep Focus” is on
- You can quickly access the focus mode in control center (swipe down from the right side of your screen)
I know that seems like a lot, but the in-app instructions will mostly guide you once you get started. Once you’re done, you won’t get messages asking for two factor authentication in the middle of the night!
Something to think about: you may also want to add numbers for your local police station, in case your loved one needs bail. They’re really taking account sharing seriously, never know when you’ll end up behind bars!
Do Not Disturb on Android
This is a bit more straightforward. Your version of Android may change this considerably, but this is how it’s done on Android 13, Google’s latest version of the operating system. I don’t use my Android phone as a daily driver, so I don’t have as much experience with this, but I did quickly run through the settings.
- Open Settings
- Scroll down to Notifications
- Scroll down to the “General” section, where you’ll find “Do Not Disturb”
- Enable the people you want to interrupt by tapping “People”
- Here you can select those who can send messages through and calls separately
- Select the contacts you want by pressing the gear icon next to “Contacts.”
- Personally, I starred the contacts I wanted to be able to have message me, and then selected “Starred Contacts” instead
- Tap calls and repeat the process
- If you want to allow repeat callers through, here’s where you select it.
- Go back to Do Not Disturb
- Here, make sure that “Alarms and other interruptions” includes Alarms
- You can also use Schedules to set a schedule, like the times you sleep
I like that Android puts this all in one place, and treats all “Do not disturb” types the same. I understand why Apple went with “Focus Modes,” but I think people are more likely to just want to simply turn off unimportant notifications. I feel like the focus modes, like custom home screens, wallpapers, and notification modes, could have been separate features. But, hey, I’m not the CEO of a trillion-dollar company, what do I know?
And there you have it. Now you can sleep through the night, even if you have random messages coming through in the middle of the night.