[Update: Fixed] Samsung may bring back ability to customise message ringtones for individual contacts

Update (June 15):

Samsung Messages v4.4.30.5 finally brings back the individual text message notifications. The update can be downloaded from APKMirror.

Update (June 14):

Samsung will bring back the feature in a future update. More information here.

Update (May 01):

We are getting reports that Samsung may incorporate the asked for change in the next update.
https://twitter.com/cbracken20111/status/991029737781977094

Just heard back from Samsung Support They are bringing the feature back to the fold as too when they were not sure of the date But they have had a lot of feedback on this issue and they are restoring it. The person told me too wait it out he would get back to me on when this will roll out so hang in there!!

Update (April 27):

Here’s what a Community Manager recently said while addressing the matter on the company’s European help forum:

We can really see how much impact this change in design has been and that this is a really desired feature. This has been submitted to our development teams and your comments in this thread are being shared as examples of how important this is to our customers.

As a change to the design and functionality, this suggestion has to be reviewed for redevelopment as a feature of the core application.

Update (April 20):

Another user recently got to hear the same.

I just spoke to Samsung. They said that they have contacted the software developer to include it in the next software update. I have no answer on a time frame though.

Update (April 13):

A user recently got to hear from Samsung Support that the next update shall bring back the feature in question.

I called Samsung as well and I was told that they have been flooded with complaints about this particular feature. Evidently, Oreo update disabled this feature and it should be enabled at the next update…however, customer service could not tell me when that would be.

Original story:

The sheer disappointment of Samsung Galaxy S8 and Note8 users after receiving the Android 8.0 update (and even the ones who bought the latest flagship Galaxy S9 baked with Oreo) – which took away the ability to setup separate SMS ringtones for individual contacts – has apparently convinced the company to consider bringing back the feature. Oh yes, you heard us right.

Right after the Oreo update got live, recipients of the same started heading to different Samsung-related help forums giving a thumbs down to the change that it brought along. Since then, users have been massively complaining as well as requesting Samsung to bring back the feature to customise SMS ringtones.

We call it massive, as a single thread on the company’s official US help forum swelled within 2 weeks with hundreds of posts – hitting the number upto 83 pages – with all users chiming about the same. BTW, there are multiple number of such threads with users wording their concern – 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10.

Tada! Good news

Calm down, as now there’s a ray of hope. One of the moderators on the company’s official European help forum recently reverted back to a complainant revealing the news saying

I can confirm that feature is no longer available for the in-built Message app for phones on Oreo/Samsung Experience 9.0. However, we’ve taken it on board as a suggestion for a future update – so hopefully we can bring it back for you guys.

As you can see in the above picture, the moderator further linked to the Community Manager’s post (on another thread addressing the matter) for more information. Here’s what the CM said

Thank you for getting in touch. Your feedback is really important to us and helps us drive improvements in our products. We can confirm that the ability to customise text tones to a specific contact is no longer available in the native Message application on our devices running Oreo. This has been a design change in this version of Samsung Experience 9.0 (aka Samsung’s release of Oreo).

We can see from this thread how important this is to you to make the most out of the Samsung in your life and have passed this suggestion on as an improvement to this new iteration of the operating system.

Further more they also added

In the meantime, as a number of people have mentioned on this thread, there are a multitude of alternative third-party Messaging apps that can facilitate this functionality available on the Play Store. A few that I have tried out myself include Android Messages, Textra and QKSMS.

While it’s appeasing that Samsung may work and offer what interests users in this case, currently all this is just in its initial phase, and we’are keeping an eye on what the company finally decides. We hope it all ends positively returning the functionality to where it was. Meanwhile, third party applications are the only alternative.

Stay connected with us on Twitter (@PiunikaWeb) to hear about all related developments as and when they occur