Samsung Galaxy S10 low battery notification sound can't be turned off, possibly a One UI bug

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Current gen Samsung phone users are blessed (literally!) to have One UI as their operating system interface. Well, I’m personally very much biased towards vanilla Android/’stock’ AOSP like interface. But One UI is miles ahead from the prehistoric abomination called TouchWiz.

There were a number of reasons behind the near-universal hatred against Samsung’s old UIs. Although the Korean OEM incorporated various innovative features, factors like inconsistency in design, memory hogging and clutteredness ultimately forced them to opt for a redesign.

Samsung chose Android 9.0 Pie as the foundation of One UI – the successor to TouchWiz and Samsung Experience user interfaces. The Galaxy S10 lineup was the first to feature preinstalled One UI out of the box. Later on, older phones (Galaxy S9/S8, Note 9/Note 8 etc.) got them via OTA update.

While being a pleasant visual refresh, Samsung engineers worked pretty hard to make One UI in Galaxy S10 (as well as in other phones) as much as snappy-cum-functional as possible. System-wide dark mode, automation support via Bixby routines, integration with Good Lock etc. are some the examples.

Well, nothing is free from bugs and erroneous designs!

After playing with their shiny Galaxy S10e/S10/S10+ for a few days, some users have found out that there is absolutely no way to disable the low battery notification sound in their phones.

Is there any way to disable (or at least make silent) the low battery notifications at 15% and then 5%?

The closest I can get is to the notifications for the System UI app. All the other notifications for that app can be silenced and/or minimised, but the Low Battery notification is set on “Sound and pop-up” and can’t be changed.

Anyone?

(Source)

Ablity to silence low battery is grayed out in the System UI. I believe this to be a bug. Only way to silence this is to turn all notifcation to silent. Its almost a deal breaker for me. I really hate to have to return this phone but if there is not a fix or a work around before the return peried, this phone is going back.

(Source)

At this moment, I have to bring out a little lesson on the history of Android.

Managing notifications used to a hot mess in Android. The APIs were erratic and third party apps often abused them.

With the release of Android 8.0 Oreo, Google initiated a massive redesign by introducing Notification Channels:

Starting in Android 8.0 (API level 26), all notifications must be assigned to a channel. For each channel, you can set the visual and auditory behavior that is applied to all notifications in that channel. Then, users can change these settings and decide which notification channels from your app should be intrusive or visible at all.

In Android 9.0 Pie, Google further extended the concept to system apps like the System UI. Thus it is now possible to control the way you get low battery notifications, even turn them off completely.

For example, in vanilla Android Pie (like the one running in Google Pixels or Android One phones), you can go through Settings => Apps & notifications => See all X apps (X be the number of apps installed on the phone) => select the three vertical dots in the upper-right corner => Choose “Show system”.

Now that you can see the system apps, find ‘System UI’ on that list and select it to open corresponding App Info page. Choose ‘Notifications’ to see the list of notifications categories managed by the System UI app.

After choosing ‘Battery’, you can finally change its behavior according to your choice. You can selectively silence the sound or turn off the popup notification, for example.

Back to the Galaxy S10 and One UI, the specific option is reportedly grayed out. Apart from silencing every notification out there (which is obviously not a very feasible solution), S10 users bound to listen the default ‘Spaceline’ tune whenever the battery juice is draining out.

I’m loving my S10+ but I’m so extremely annoyed and frustrated that you cannot disable low battery notifications or at least silence them. Everything on the System UI app for low battery alerts is grayed out. It doesn’t help that it plays my most hated notification tone of all time,”spaceline”. I don’t think any of us are unaware when our battery is low.

(Source)

Before anyone is getting curious, the particular option remain grayed out even in safe mode.

Presumably the bug is related to One UI, as another user having Samsung Galaxy S9+ has discovered the same anomaly after recent (Pie) update.

My s9+ had been doing exactly the same as the OP since the update a few weeks ago. Like the OP I also cannot change the pop up or sound from occurring in system ui, it’s all blanked out. Exactly the same as OP..

(Source)

The impact of this small, but quirky bug is broader than you can imagine – as the whole user base of older Galaxy and Note phones should stumble on this particular glitch soon enough.

We hope Samsung will fix the UX bug in upcoming monthly updates. Do comment on the aforementioned threads and via Samsung Members app in your Galaxy S10 to highlight the issue.

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