Ask HN: Why is there no way to lower amber alert volume on headphones? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no way to lower amber alert volume on headphones?

#11

Post by daveguy » Wed, Nov 09, 2022, 2:20 PM UTC

3pt14159 wrote: post #7

These are obviously complete trash. Waking people up in the middle of the night for some random child that was abducted half a Belgium away with no real call to action even if it were in the same very small town. What we need is political pressure for a pay-to-play solution. You fire an alert at my phone, that's $100 deposited within a week against my phone bill or offered via mail for the pay-as-you-go burner phone…

Your solution is, "give me $100 every time a child goes missing?" Did I get that right?

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no way to lower amber alert volume on headphones?

#12

Post by lupire » Wed, Nov 09, 2022, 2:22 PM UTC

MerelyMortal wrote: post #4

I want to be able to silence Amber Alerts but still receive them. On Android, my only options are completely off, or full-blast obnoxious tone. I CANNOT have my phone making noise, so it has to be fully off. If there was a choice for silent notifications, I would choose that.

https://www.missingkids.org/gethelpnow/amber#howtoreceiveamb...

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no way to lower amber alert volume on headphones?

#13

Post by kube-system » Wed, Nov 09, 2022, 2:22 PM UTC

It's probably just lazy development and testing practices.

Maybe you could tweak something here?:

https://cs.android.com/android/platform/superproject/+/maste...

(although it looks like there's some code that already intends to do this function)

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no way to lower amber alert volume on headphones?

#14

Post by avian » Wed, Nov 09, 2022, 2:22 PM UTC

Is it possible it's only a specific combination of hardware and software that's having this issue?

We don't have amber alerts in my country (or at least I never got one). However Mi wireless earbuds + Nokia X10 for some reason reset to a painfully loud 100% volume when receiving a call. I can lower the volume in settings, but on next call it resets to 100% again. Same phone with a different Bluetooth headphones and same headphones with different phone work fine.

I don't know the whole software stack to point fingers whose fault it is, but there must be a bug either in this specific phone's Bluetooth implementation, Android 12 or the Mi earbuds.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no way to lower amber alert volume on headphones?

#15

Post by PebblesRox » Wed, Nov 09, 2022, 2:23 PM UTC

mathieuh wrote: post #3

Full disclosure: I pulled this information out of my arse, but perhaps it's to avoid the situation where you leave them connected without realising? If it plays at max volume through the headphones you have a better chance of hearing it even if you're not actually wearing the headphones

If that's the purpose, a better version would start out quiet and get louder over time to give people a chance to remove the earbuds.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no way to lower amber alert volume on headphones?

#16

Post by weird-eye-issue » Wed, Nov 09, 2022, 2:23 PM UTC

tyleo wrote: post #5

bombcar wrote: post #2

My guess is a conservative reading of the applicable laws, if anything. Turn off amber alerts; they're entirely useless and you can now turn them off without turning off the tornado warnings (almost entirely useless, too).

Why are they useless? I grew up in an area with tornadoes and when one came ripping through my childhood suburb and destroyed some houses I was happy to have forewarning.

Amber alerts are not related to tornadoes

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no way to lower amber alert volume on headphones?

#17

Post by PragmaticPulp » Wed, Nov 09, 2022, 2:23 PM UTC

tyleo wrote: post #5

bombcar wrote: post #2

My guess is a conservative reading of the applicable laws, if anything. Turn off amber alerts; they're entirely useless and you can now turn them off without turning off the tornado warnings (almost entirely useless, too).

Why are they useless? I grew up in an area with tornadoes and when one came ripping through my childhood suburb and destroyed some houses I was happy to have forewarning.

> Why are they useless?

I can’t speak to tornado alerts, but the Amber Alert child alerts were becoming excessive and useless in my state.

I was getting alerts from many hundreds of miles away, often while trying to sleep. Other times they’d forget to put relevant information in the first alert so they’d send several more to follow up. When we finally got a series of multiple Amber alerts in the middle of the night, most of the people I know turned them off.

The system may have started with good intentions, but it was mismanaged and abused so much that it became useless.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no way to lower amber alert volume on headphones?

#18

Post by sidewndr46 » Wed, Nov 09, 2022, 2:24 PM UTC

tyleo wrote: post #5

bombcar wrote: post #2

My guess is a conservative reading of the applicable laws, if anything. Turn off amber alerts; they're entirely useless and you can now turn them off without turning off the tornado warnings (almost entirely useless, too).

Why are they useless? I grew up in an area with tornadoes and when one came ripping through my childhood suburb and destroyed some houses I was happy to have forewarning.

I live in Texas. I get Amber alerts for missing children that are 8 hours of interstate driving away from me. That's completely useless.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no way to lower amber alert volume on headphones?

#19

Post by jwie » Wed, Nov 09, 2022, 2:24 PM UTC

It’s likely one of those edge cases that nobody cares to solve. It probably involves some scoping issue where one system doesn’t know the conditions of the downstream system.

Emergency volumes are supposed to be loud, and override the volume settings.

The thing making that override doesn’t know what the actual audio output channel is, or what “loud” means on that channel.

Users “reverse opt in” to amber alerts by not turning them off. Most people just these off. There’s way too many of them, and the vast majority of these are a custody dispute escalation. Don’t feel bad for shutting these off.

With this fact pattern the issue never makes it to the top of the stack to solve.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no way to lower amber alert volume on headphones?

#20

Post by bombcar » Wed, Nov 09, 2022, 2:24 PM UTC

mrits wrote: post #10

tyleo wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are they useless? I grew up in an area with tornadoes and when one came ripping through my childhood suburb and destroyed some houses I was happy to have forewarning.

I have amber alerts disabled but still receive weather emergency notifications. Which makes sense. Perhaps it works differently in different states? In Texas my iPhone has this alert granularity: AMBER Emergency Public Safety Test

There's WATCH and WARNING and (unnamed) - some locations just send everything WATCH and above (some even send ADVISORY which is incredibly stupid).

If the local government is sane, they send WARNING and (unnamed) only - (unnamed) being the YOU ARE ALREADY DEAD MAKE YOUR TIME notices.

Then if you want WATCH you set your weather app to notify you on those.