Phone ringtone or notification tone can be annoying or even embarrassing when you are in an important meeting or in the cinema.
In some locations, you are required and reminded to silence your phones, e.g., in a library or museum.
Since Android Lollipop, Android introduced a new notification and interruption system, which offers better and finer controls on interruptions.
But it is a bit complicated and therefore many owners are confused on basic operation, e.g., how to silence the phone.
In Android Lollipop, Google introduced smart volume control and make it easier for new users to control the volumes and set different interruption mode. Of course, this includes silencing Android Marshmallow phones.
In your Android Marshmallow phones, when you are not playing music or videos, press volume button (volume up or volume down), you will see the volume options as shown below.
You can hold volume down button until it reaches the minimum.
Alternatively, you can drag the volume level indicator all the way to the minimum as shown below.
This will change your phone from sound mode to vibrate mode.
Under vibrate mode, phone will vibrate instead of ring. This also applies to notification tones.
This is the quickest way to silence Android Marshmallow phones.
But vibrate mode is only for ringtone and notification tones. It has no effects on alarms and media players.
As mentioned, vibrate mode only silences ringtone and notification tone.
To silence alarms and media player, you can tap the arrow button as shown below.
You can then find the volume settings for:
You can adjust the volume to minimum as you did for ringtone above to silence Android Marshmallow phones totally.
One of the prominent new features in Android Marshmallow is the Do Not Disturb feature.
One of the many possible usages of Do Not Disturb is to silence Android Marshmallow phones automatically and intelligently. Please refer to this guide on how to use Do Not Disturb in Android Marshmallow.
This guide I will show you how to use Do Not Disturb on-the-fly to silence Android Marshmallow phones quickly.
In quick settings (swipe down from top of the screen with two fingers, or swipe down twice with one finger as explained in this page), you can find the Do Not Disturb (DnD)as shown below.
Tap Do not Disturb to enable it.
When you enable Do not Disturb, you will have to choose one of the three modes: priority, alarm only, and total silence.
As shown below, by default, you will enter priority mode.
In this mode, only certain callers and certain apps can disturb you. You can configure contacts and apps that can disturb you in priority mode in Settings— Sound and notifications —Do Not Disturb— Priority only allows.
You can tap Customize to customize your priority mode on-the-fly.
You can specify when priority mode ends. You can choose to end it until you manually turn it off, or after how many hours as shown below.
If you make any changes, tap Done to apply the changes.
Alarm only mode will only allow alarms to disturb you.
Again, as shown below, you can set when to exit alarm only mode.
As the name suggests, total silence model will silence your phone totally. No sound, no vibrations.
Again, you can set when to exit total silence mode as shown below.
You can exit Do no Disturb manually at any time through:
If you have any questions or encounter any problems on how to silence Android Marshmallow phones, please let us know them in the comment box below.
The community will help you.
For any questions or problems with Android Marshmallow, please check our Android Marshmallow Guide page.
If your question is about Android Lollipop, please check out Android Lollipop Guide page.
For other Android guides, please check our Android 101 page.
View Comments
Uh, no. This is not correct. On my Samsung note 4 with Marshmallow, Do Not Disturb does not silence media. Hence if I mis-hit (remove the hyphen and you have my verbal response when this happens) a button during a meeting, music or media may start and I have to fumble around to find how to shut it off. It would be nice like an Apple 5 to have a switch to cut the speaker, or if the great "Mute all" widget on Google Play could be made to appear on the lockscreen. But not yet. As for the above solution, it's not a solution. It's misinformation. Shame on you.
Someone help me. When I put my moto g4 on DND mode it becomes silent. But once I get a call it comes out of silent mode and starts ringing from d next call. The same thing happens even if I put my phone on vibrate mode
The phone will exit DND mode after you pick up the call, if you set DND until you turn it off. It should not exit of DND if it is scheduled.
One negative aspect of DND mode is that when it is over, everything goes back to maximum volume instead of the volumes you had set before. So then you have to go back in and set your volumes again. I think the ICON they used to have that let you toggle through mute, vibrate, and sound on was better than this fancy new feature by a long shot.
It is a bug in some specific phones, not the fault of the feature. Most vendors fixed the bug already.
Did you try to update the phone firmware?
I do agree with all of the ideas you have presented in your post. They're very convincing and will certainly work. Still, the posts are too short for starters. Could you please extend them a bit from next time? Thanks for the post.