Galaxy S6: How to Mute Alerts with a Gesture

Google didn’t really make it easy for everyone to enable silent mode in Lollipop but the Galaxy S6 has a mute gesture that can be quite useful at times.

Google made millions of Android users upset when they removed the sacred silent mode from Android with the release of 5.0 Lollipop. As a whole, the update was received rather well but once the honeymoon stage was over we started seeing changes like this that didn’t go over too well with the community. In Google’s defense, they did implement a very sophisticated Priority Mode that worked better than silent mode. . .if it had been fleshed out a little more.

The thing is, 3rd party applications had to set whether or not their alerts could be silenced with Priority Mode on and if they didn’t then it wouldn’t.

Samsung actually released an update to their 5.0.2 Lollipop release that added in their own version of Silent Mode and while that is good and all, that isn’t what this post is about. Instead, I wanted to talk about a gesture feature that was added to TouchWiz that lets you pick and choose when to silence alerts like incoming calls, alarms and notifications. You can do this at any time and it doesn’t require that you fiddle around with buttons or settings, as long as you have gone through the settings and set this up. Once the feature is set up, it will automatically work each and every time that you do the gesture. There’s even a couple of ways that you can activate this gesture too.

Galaxy S6 Mute Alerts Gesture

  1. Launch the Settings Application on the Galaxy S6
  2. Locate and Tap on the ‘Motions and Gesture’ Menu Option
  3. Toggle on the ‘Mute’ Option Toward the Bottom
  4. Press the Home Button to Exit

Explanation

Once this gesture has been activated it will work no matter where you are and what you are doing. As the tip says above, you have one of two different ways to mute your device once this gesture has been enabled. One way is to simply cover the screen with your hand while the alert, alarm or incoming call is happening. The Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge will detect this gesture and it will silence the current alert that is happening right now. You can let your hand off the screen once it has been muted and it will continue to mute that specific alert. However, if you get another alert later then it will not be muted until you do the gesture again.

Another way to do this is to turn the Galaxy S6 or Galaxy S6 Edge over, face down, on the table/bed/lap/etcetera. This can be easier and quicker to do for some people and I like that Samsung has given users the option. Technically, the same sensors are working no matter if your hand covers it or if the device is turned face down. I could see Samsung monitoring the gyroscope sensor too though and that might be what is detected when you turn the device over. Either way, the end result is the same and whatever alert is going off at moment will be muted until it stops. This is a polite and respectful way of ignoring the alert if you are in the middle of something(like talking to your boss), instead of picking the phone up, looking at it and then deciding to mute it.

These gestures aren’t for everyone but I appreciate it when Samsung puts in these features because they know how large their customer base is. This could be a very useless feature in one country but incredibly vital in a completely other region. With Samsung being a worldwide company, having these features is a great way to satisfy everyone. That is, assuming this doesn’t affect anything like performance or battery life. with Samsung working so hard on optimizing TouchWiz with Lollipop, I can’t see any downside to including a feature like this even if it only makes 10% of their customer base happy.

Have you ever used this mute gesture before? Did it work exactly as you had hoped or would you like to see Samsung enhance this in a particular way? Let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment below.

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  1. I have a strange behaviour with the S6 and Telegram. Whenever I listen to a voice message and happen to cover the proximity sensor – or what it is – the display goes off and the message stops playing. When I remove my hand the message continues to play. Can you tell me why this happens? My friend has the same problem with her Note 3.

    1. Hi Thomas. I have this same experience with WhatsApp. What is happening is that Telegram is assuming you have put the phone up to your ear.

      The message doesn’t actually stop playing, but the audio output starts to go through the ear speaker on the device. You can test this by playing a voice note, then putting the phone up to your ear as if you were talking on the phone. You should still hear the voice note playing from this other speaker

      1. Thanks for that information. It is still annoying, especially when my cat walks over the phone. Why are so many things not optional, but forced upon us?

        1. I ask myself that a lot and especially when a new feature is forced on users when I was happy and preferred the way it was before.

          I’ve heard developers talk about this and they say that each time you add a feature that can be toggled on/off, it adds another layer of QA testing to it.

          So for example, if developer A puts feature Z into an application and lets the users toggle it on and off, when the developer goes to add feature Y into the app, they’ll need to test and make sure it works with feature Z both on and off.

          This doesn’t seem like much work at first, but each new feature you add that can be toggled on and off increases the QA work(and the possibility for bugs) exponentially

          1. Well, looking at the masses of settings in my S6 I guess it is not too difficult to make another option. But it is typical for Samsung to change things without any option (or asking the customers first). When I bought my Note 1 I did it because of the very easy to use notes app S-Memo. Just a blank screen where you can write on, and you could put several of the notes as widgets on to your home screen directly from the app. I used this very often when I did support in a bigger company. Then from one day to the other the app got deleted with an firmware update and replaced by S-Notes, which is more complicated and slower.

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