IssueTracker

A serious issue that I feel plagues Android is that media and phone volume share the same physical volume buttons and the context of what will be adjusted when they are pressed changes depending on what's currently happening on the device. For example, if you're trying to lower the volume of media so that you don't blow your ears out right before a YouTube video starts then you may find yourself adjusting the phone volume instead if the device hasn't decided that you're watching media at that exact moment yet.

In my family, this has become a contentious issue as people become unreachable by phone because they've accidentally lowered their phone volume too much while working with media and now e.g. they're in a store and have no idea their phone is ringing because it's so quiet.

But in terms of UI, I don't think that most people want to adjust their phone volume all the time. I personally set what I feel is an acceptable level for most purposes and would like to keep it there, retaining the option to quickly switch to vibrate/silent/priority as the situation requires. Aside from this I sometimes wonder why the volume rocker isn't always associated with media volume - but alas my device is a phone at the end of the day and perhaps that would be going too far.

What I would love to see is a button on the volume UI that locks the phone ringer volume in place. When locked, any attempt to change media volume would succeed but an attempt to change phone volume would be denied -- the UI would appear but the lock icon would be shown and would pulsate to indicate the lock was active and preventing the action. Note that this would necessitate some change in the way the user turned on vibrate and silent modes, which you would still want to provide a mechanism for independent of whether or not the phone volume was locked. Perhaps there is a UI button that cycles between ring, vibrate, and silent. I think a lot of people have been asking for an easy way to change between those modes here anyway.

Thanks for consideration.