How to Customize Alert and Notification Sounds on Your iPhone

Sound alerts are an important part of your iPhone and changing them is a great way to personalize your experience.

When a call or notification arrives, the tone should be pleasant. For example, my iPhone ringtone is the theme song of my favorite TV show, The Office. Every time I get a call, that tone lifts my spirits a little.

If you are tired of the same default tones, we will show you how to customize the alert sounds on your iPhone such as ringtone, text alert, alarm tone and third party notification sounds of WhatsApp, Telegram, Gmail, Messenger, Slack, so Further.

Set up a ringtone for your iPhone

Go to Settings > Sounds & Feel and tap Ringtone. From here touch the tones; it will play and become your new ringtone. Do this for different ringtones and stop when you get to one that suits your needs.

In the ringtone screen above, any ringtone you have purchased or transferred from your computer will be displayed at the top. After that, you have built-in long (about 30 seconds) Apple ringtones followed by short (a few seconds) alert tones. Both the ringtone and alert tones section also have classic options, and clicking on them reveals even more options.

The ringtone set above becomes the default ringtone for all phone and FaceTime calls. Also, if a third-party calling app doesn’t support its own ringtone, it will use the default ringtone you set above.

But you don’t like this one-size-fits-all approach? In this case, you can set your own ringtones for specific contacts. I have set different ringtones for parents, wife, brothers and sisters. So even when my iPhone is in my pocket or somewhere else, I know who is calling just by the ringtone.

At iDB, we’ve covered a few guides related to ringtones and here are some that I think you’ll be interested in:

• How to put a ringtone on an iPhone (4 ways)
• How to create free ringtones for your iPhone with Music on Mac (and iTunes)
• How to re-download purchased ringtones on iPhone and iPad
• How to Create Ringtone or Text Alarm on iPhone for Free with GarageBand

Customize Your iPhone’s Text Tone

To change the SMS and iMessage tone on iPhone, go to Settings > Sounds & Haptics and tap Text Tone. From here, use the tone you like.

While you can set a ringtone as the text tone, I don’t recommend doing this, as a long beep alert for every incoming message is sure to annoy you and the people around you.

Related: How to disable iMessage notifications on iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Mac

Setting other tones

When you’re on the Sounds and Haptics screen, you have the option to personalize various other alerts such as New Voicemail, New Mail, Sent Mail, Calendar, and Reminder. Touch one of them and select the tone of your choice. If you miss reminders due to a short, weak default tone, consider setting a long and loud ringtone as your reminder sound.

Set up an alarm

To change the iPhone alarm tone, you need to go to the Clock app. From there, tap Alarm Clock > Edit > select an alarm clock > Sound and select a song or ringtone. Finally, go back and click Save.

Set Timer Tone on iPhone

Open the Clock app and tap Timer. Here, tap “When the timer runs out”and select a ringtone. Please note that if you select “Stop Playing”, this means that after the timer expires, everything that is playing in the media app on your iPhone will stop playing. This has its uses, but it also means your iPhone won’t inform you when you’re setting the timer in the kitchen or other work. So make sure you always go back to using the ringtone as your timer sound.

Enable or disable keyboard sound

You can easily select the sound for each keystroke on your iPhone. To do this, go to iPhone Settings > Sounds & Feel > Keyboard Responsiveness and turn on the Sound toggle.

Customizing Third-Party App Sounds

If a third party app doesn’t have a notification sound system available, it seems to use the default text tone as the notification sound. Some apps also use custom sounds as their notification tone, which you can change in the app’s settings.

Here’s how you can personalize the notification sound of some popular third-party apps.

whatsapp

Open WhatsApp, tap Settings > Notifications > Sounds and choose a ringtone for the alert. When finished, click Save. WhatsApp allows you to set different notification sounds for direct messages and group chats. On the same screen (Reaction Notifications), you can also opt out of being notified when someone reacts (not responds) to your message with an emoji.

Telegram

You can customize the sound of Telegram notifications from within the app by going to its settings and selecting Notifications & Sounds > Private Chats or Group Chats or Channels > Sound. From here, select the tone you want and click Done.

In addition to using the listed tones, Telegram also allows you to upload your own tone and set it as your alert sound. Pretty awesome!

gmail

To change the sound of the Gmail notification on your iPhone, open the official Gmail app and tap on the three lines icon in the top left corner. Then scroll down and select “Settings”> select the added Google account > Notification sounds > Email and select the desired tone from the list.

Messenger

Don’t like the default Facebook Messenger notification sound on your iPhone? You can easily change this. Open Messenger and tap your profile picture in the top left corner. Then tap Notifications & Sounds > Text Tone and choose a different alert sound.

Weak

To change the Slack notification sound on your iPhone, open the Slack app and tap “You”at the bottom. Now tap Notifications > Sound and select Default Device or one of the available tones.

Other applications

Above, we showed you how to change the notification sound for some popular apps. But I’m sure you have a few other apps whose alert sound you might want to customize. The easiest way to do this is to open this app and look through its settings, where you usually see the option to change the notification sound.

In addition, you can also access notification settings for some third-party apps by going to iPhone Settings > Notifications > tap the app > [app name] Notification Settings. This will open the notification settings within the app. You can make changes here.