One text message can make a silent phone ring

Everyone who has lost a phone at home knows the routine. Somebody offers to call it, you both stand very still, and nothing happens, because the phone has been on silent since the last meeting you sat through. I’ve done that walk around my house more often than I’d like to admit, lifting cushions and checking the bed more than twice.

The fix is an automation I created for my wife. And it listens for one specific text message. When a message containing a phrase you chose arrives, the phone pushes its media volume to the top and starts playing an alarm. It takes about ten minutes to build on an iPhone, using the Shortcuts app that’s already installed.

A call obeys silent mode, and a text is more powerful than you think

Silent mode does one job, which is to stop calls and notifications from making noise. It does that job whether the caller is a telemarketer or you, standing in your own kitchen with someone else’s phone. The phone can’t tell that this particular call is the one you need to hear.

What silent mode has never covered is music. That’s the reason a video will still blare out of a phone you were sure was muted, and it’s the gap this whole trick walks through. If the phone can be told to start playing something loud, the silent setting doesn’t get a say.

A text message is different because the phone can read it. iPhones have a feature called personal automations, which are rules of the form “when this happens, do that”, and they run on their own with nobody tapping anything. One of the things a rule can watch for is an incoming message containing particular words. So the plan is to pick a phrase nobody would ever send you by accident, and tell the phone that this phrase means its owner is looking for it.

The phrase is a spare key. Hand it to the people you live with, and a phone on silent stops being a phone you can’t find.

Here’s the whole rule, written out the way Shortcuts thinks about it.

WHEN   a message arrives containing "phone alert siren"
FROM   the contacts you choose
RUN    immediately, no confirmation

DO     1. Set Volume   100%
       2. Play Music   an alarm track

Two actions are enough. The rule never has to take the phone off silent, since music wasn’t covered by silent in the first place. It only has to make sure the volume isn’t sitting at zero, then play something that’s impossible to ignore.

Building it takes about ten minutes

Open the Shortcuts app and go to the Automation tab at the bottom. Tap the plus, and choose Message from the list of triggers.

Two fields matter on the next screen. Message Contains is where the phrase goes. Sender is where you choose who’s allowed to set it off, and I’ll come back to that because it’s the one decision in here that deserves some thought. Below those, pick Run Immediately. If you leave it on the other option, the phone will politely ask for permission on a screen you can’t find, which isn’t much help.

Tap Next and add the actions. Search for Set Volume and drag it to 100%, then add Play Music and choose the track. Play Music takes its track from the Music app, so there has to be something suitably awful in the library for it to play. Pick an alarm over a song, because a song blends into a noisy room and an alarm doesn’t. Tap Done, and the rule is live.

Because nothing here touches the silent setting, it works the same on an older iPhone with the physical mute switch as it does on a new one.

Decide who’s allowed to make your phone scream

Leaving Sender empty means the phrase works from any number. That’s the most useful version, because it works from a colleague’s phone, a neighbour’s, or a stranger’s who’s being kind. It also means anybody who knows your number and your phrase can set your phone off in the middle of a meeting, or a funeral.

Choosing senders limits it to the contacts you pick. You lose the kind stranger and gain the certainty that only those people can do it, and two or three people you live with is about the right number.

I’d choose senders, and I’d make the phrase something odd. A single common word like “lost” will fire the first time a friend texts you that they’ve lost their keys. The phrase in this piece is only an example, and it’s now on the internet, so don’t use it.

Find My already does this, and I still built it

Apple’s Find My can play a sound on a silent iPhone, and Google’s version for Android rings a phone “at full volume for 5 minutes, even if it’s set to silent or vibrate”, which is how Google describes it. Both are good, and you should know where they live before the morning you need them.

What they ask for is a second device signed in to your account, or a browser and a password typed from memory while you’re already late. The text message asks for whoever is standing next to you. It’s also something your mum can do for you without knowing what an Apple Account is.

I carry a Pixel myself and built this on my wife’s iPhone, so that’s the only version I can vouch for. Android has nothing like it built in, though automation apps such as MacroDroid and Tasker can watch for an incoming text containing a phrase, then raise the volume and play a sound, which gets you to the same place.

The limits are the ones you’d expect. The phone has to be switched on, and it needs signal or Wi-Fi to receive the message, so this is for the house, the office and the car, and Find My is still the tool you want for a phone left in a taxi.

Test it before you need it

Build it tonight. Then put the phone on silent, leave it in another room, and send the phrase from someone else’s phone, because an automation you’ve never tested is one you’ll find out about on the wrong morning. Tell the people you live with what the phrase is, and write it down somewhere they’ll look, since the one person guaranteed to remember it is the one who can’t find their phone.

If you’d like a walkthrough with screenshots, iGeeksBlog has one. Fair warning, theirs takes the phone off silent instead of playing an alarm, so you still have to call it afterwards.