Individual Ringtone for Contacts

We want to look into that for you, @MN7943!

As you've already discovered, and as clarified by our Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra article which includes instructions on how to assign a specific ringtone to a specific contact, selecting View More from the edit contact screen is the primary recommendation.

Try this instead. When editing a contact, and if Allow Storage permission is available (among Custom vibration), select it (Allow Storage permission) then grant permission when requested. The option to select a custom ringtone should then be available for the contact.

Let us know how this worked for you!

Lar, AT&T Community Specialist

Your contacts can be stored in different places: your SIM, the phone, G-mail or some other server.  Each contact can be stored in a different place.

Where are the contacts stored on which you are trying to activate this feature?

@MN7943 ,

Unfortunately, Samsung removed the individual ringtone setting in contacts some time back - I think with Android 9.  This was a big issue back then, even on the Android Central forums (which I am a member of as well), so someone there should have remembered that.

Now you set them in the messaging app.  That means you can't set a ringtone for someone ahead of time, but only after a conversation has started with that contact. 

If you are using the default "Messages" app, go to an existing conversation with the person you want to set the ringtone for, click the three dots at the upper right corner, then you will see "Notification Sound" with "Set a custom notification sound" under that.  That's where you set it.

And, a word of advice - don't bother calling AT&T customer service for this kind of thing.  Most of them don't even know that it is AT&T that provides the OS updates directly to their branded phones.

Unfortunately, Samsung removed the individual ringtone setting in contacts some time back - I think with Android 9

It wasn't Android 9, or if it was, it's back in Android 10.  My Galaxy S9 still has the feature.  However, it used to be when the contact is stored in Exchange server, I could not record ringtone or vibration pattern; today it turns out that I can.  When using Google as my contact storage, I can.  In the past, I have moved contacts from Exchange to Gmail so that I could give them custom ringtones.

For instance, my wife's contact has several instances. One stored on the phone, the others on Google. None of them offer me the Ringtone option. Only custom vibration. In messages, I can only choose the message notification sound, but at least I can choose from the list.

@ATTHelp, that works. Stupidest menu Android has ever introduced, IMHO. But thank you for your KB.

We're glad we could share helpful information to your ringtone feature concern @MN7943.

Please reach back out if you have additional questions or concerns in the future as we are always here to help.

Jonye, AT&T Community Specialist  

Yeah, I went looking again, and it is there - seems awfully convoluted way of getting there, but... it does work.

I think the issue here is the granularization of Android application security.  Since an application can now be given some required security rights and not some optional security rights, when they don't have those optional security rights, they hide the features that those security rights let them do.  By granting the rights, the features come back.