Android 10 and 11 notification settings - vibrate only in vibrate mode

crumbworks · July 26, 2021

Hey all. I feel like this is an odd question but I cant figure it. My previous phones (Nexus S, Moto X 2014, Nexus 5, etc) all worked as intended in terms of notifications, but my Pixel 3a does not

It was set up for notification sounds for when my ringer was on (just sound, no vibration) and if I switched to Android's vibrate mode, it vibrated instead. Easy enough, right? Vibrate in lieu of the sound. Common sense, at least in my head.

Not so with my Pixel 3a. In Vibrate mode, the app will only vibrate if I set it to vibrate INDIVIDUALLY in the settings itself. Meaning it vibrates all the time, even when the ringer is on. I can't get it to vibrate only in vibrate mode. If I don't enable 100% vibration, the notifications in vibrate mode pop up silently. It was like this in Android 10 it came with, and Android 11 now as well.

Any advice?

Bombastinator · July 26, 2021

I read the title so I had to check the post. Sounded like a “this thing is doing what it is supposed to” announcement. So much “..why?..” there. Had to be more to it.

I find I’m actually sort of disappointed that there is.

I’m going to probably kind of randomly say look at the versions of android. I don’t know much about android versions. Mostly just that they had kinda creepy “would you like some candy..?” names, and they often couldn’t keep updated after a while. Android phones tend to run different OS versions if they were released at even somewhat similar times. This might be a situation where they started doing something totally differently and this was the weirdass result.