Is there any way to find the source of these alert sounds?

[Gallopinhairpin]

My wife has a Samsung A41 runnung Android 12. It frequently gives what I presume to be the default system alert sound (4 tones) but when she unlocks there is no indication of the source. Pulling down the notification panel there's nothing there, and no flags on any apps. I've been through Notifications in Settings and turned off everything except for the most-used apps (mail, messages, Whatsapp) but she's still getting these annoying alerts. What the heck is the point of the system generating these alerts if we can't find the reason for them? Is there any way to find out?

 

[Hadron]

Is there any way to find out unfortunately depends on why it's happening. If it is generating notifications and then removing them you might find them in the notification history, which Samsung hide away very deeply in the Notifications settings (Settings > Notifications > Advanced Settings > Notification history - it was much more prominent on my previous Pixel). But I once had a problem with a user-installed system monitor app generating a tone - but not a notification - when the battery temperature exceeded some threshold, a feature which the developer had "helpfully" set on by default so you wouldn't necessarily even know existed. It took months to track that down, but I could not blame the system for it, it was this app I'd installed that was running in the background.

For what it's worth, I don't know from your description whether this is the default system notification tone: on my s21 that's 5 notes rather than 4 (3 rising, one just below peak, final one lower). 4 tones isn't ringing any bells (pun intended).

One trick in the "App Notifications" settings: you need to touch the little 3-dot menu and tell it to show system apps. If you've not done that then there could be Samsung/Google/bloatware apps responsible for this which wouldn't show in the list. And some of them they make difficult to turn off, e.g. "Digital wellbeing" has the option to turn off notifications greyed-out, which makes it look like you can't do it at all (however you can silence them, or go one layer down into "categories" and turn all of those off). There may be others that are equally hard work to turn off (I disable most Samsung apps, but they won't let you disable that one).

If you can't find some system app that's responsible, and notification history doesn't provide any clues, all I can suggest is trying to spot some pattern to when they occur to see whether that might provide a clue (e.g. in the case of the problem I had I realised that it tended to happen after - though not usually during - heavy usage, which made me wonder whether it was temperature-related).

 

[ocnbrze]

did you check the alarms? or an event on the calendar?

 

[Gallopinhairpin]

Hi Hadron, thanks for that. When I tapped show system apps a number of the ones that came up had notifications enabled and I've turned them off so we'll see what difference that makes. I found notification history was turned off. I've enabled that so hopefully if we get any more I can now track them.

I might easily be wrong about the number of tones. I was just stating from memory, which isn't so good these days

If we get any more unexplained notifications I'll report back. Thanks again.

 

[nickdalzell]

When I first got any modern Samsung phone, be it a flagship like my Z Flip 4 or a budget like any A-Series, they went [over the horizon notes] for ANY THING. Often about adding a Samsung Account, setting up your device, update notifications from Play/Galaxy Store, Cloud storage alerts, Dropbox promos, the whole nine yards. For someone coming over from Android 2.3, or the HTC Thunderbolt (remains my favorite phone, RIP and big middle fingers to the carriers for shutting down 3G) which ONLY went off for important stuff such as calls, texts, or emails, and gave far more control, modern phones tend to not allow the user to turn most of that nagware off.

There are apps such as Buzzkill that can clear 'un-clearable' notifications, which is great, but it's paid. Not a subscription thank goodness, but one time. I think $3.99.

Otherwise I keep DND (Do Not Disturb) on 24/7, exempting contacts for calls/messages. It's the closest I get to my Thunderbolt. Without it, I'd still be pulling 'weeds' as soon as I think I got all the useless notifications (and the sounds) finally done.

I started my smartphone journey with iPhone, and one of the main gripes I've always had with Android (even since the Thunderbolt/Android 2.3) is a 'messy status bar'. IMO the only things that belong up there are signal, battery status, network type, and time. I much prefer that any notifications are little red numerals on specific icons. That way I know which app has new alerts, and it doesn't trigger my OCD. I hate status bar clutter. It's even worse today.

 

[Gallopinhairpin]

I don't know from your description whether this is the default system notification tone: on my s21 that's 5 notes rather than 4

Just to update, I was wrong and it is 5. Since turning on the notification history I have identified one that made the sound without a message. It was Samsung keyboard. God only knows what triggered that but I went back into show system apps in Notifications and found it, along with a load more that I didn't see first time around. I've turned them all off. That was the only one that's popped up since the initial clearout so it's looking good.