Android Group Ringtones - Now Obsolete

Project Status: Losing Hope
View Original Post: Android Group Ringtones
How you can help: Star this topic on the Android issue tracker

This is an update to the very popular feature request for Android to add group ringtones. Unfortunately no one is happy to hear this news.

According to Google's Issue tracker the suggestion to have an option to choose group ringtones on Android is now considered "obsolete." The reason they consider this obsolete is because as of Lollipop they moved to a new "Contacts" app instead of the old "People" app. Sadly in this new app for contacts the ability to view or use your contact groups has been removed.

Assuming you have your phone setup with a Gmail account linked to it, you can still log into your Gmail account through a web page and go to your contacts groups. None of those groups however will appear on your phone as they used to.

So as you can see; without the ability to have contact groups, the request to add group ringtones is no longer possible for Android to implement. Which is why they consider this feature request to be obsolete.

As far as I am concerned this is a step backward for the Android platform. There must be some pretty strong and valid reasons why the great people over at Google chose to remove contact groups from Android, but I don't know what they are. It will be interesting to see how things develop from this point.

If you are one of the many people that miss the contact groups check out this post on the issue tracker and either add a comment or star the issue. The more stars an issue gets the more likely the development team over at Google is to take action. Hopefully that action will be bringing back group contacts. Nearly seven hundred people have starred the issue as of the date of this post. Lots of issues on this tracker only gain a handful of stars so to gain this many stars actually places this item in the top ten open issues. I can only image that Google will have to take some action on this soon, maybe they have something better in the works than what we had before.

In the meantime; there are several apps in the play store which allow you to access your groups, some even let you set group ringtones. I just wish that Google would have both of these features built in.