Smartphones have caught on to such a degree in recent years, it’s unusual to come across someone who doesn’t own one, and downright odd if said person doesn’t at least have a cell phone. In many of these venues, having the device set to full ring would not only be socially inept, it would be downright embarrassing. So rather than turn it off, what do many of us do?
Set it to vibrate. That way, we’ll still know when it’s ringing – we’ll still know when someone is trying to get in touch with us – and no one who’s with us will know. That’s the theory, anyway. I’ve found that a lot of modern phones tend to make as much noise (if not a bit more) when they vibrate as opposed to when they simply ring. They’re certainly more disruptive – but that’s neither here nor there.
The main downside to setting a phone on vibrate is that, for those of us who have custom ringtones set for our contacts, there’s no real way of telling who’s who. Someone we desperately want to talk to has the same vibration as someone we’d rather ignore. What’s a savvy user to do?
There’s always a way. 
Custom Vibrations On iOS
Setting up a custom vibration alert is actually extremely easy in iOS, but the process varies slightly depending on what version happens to be installed on your particular device. Assuming you’ve upgraded to iOS 6, setting vibrations to your contacts involves going to each individual contact to which you want to assign a vibration. Tap the contact you wish to change, hit “Edit” and then scroll down to the vibration section. You should receive a prompt asking you if you want a standard vibration or a custom vibration.
Rinse and repeat for every contact you feel is important enough to warrant the effort.
For versions of iOS below 6 (I believe 4 is the lowest version which includes this feature), you’ll need to navigate to Settings->Accessibility->Custom Vibrations. From there, you can set and customize your personalized vibration patterns, at which point you can assign each pattern to a contact (or several). Pretty simple, right?
Custom Vibrations On Android
Unfortunately, to my knowledge, Android doesn’t actually have a custom vibration pattern feature built-in to the OS, and most droid phones haven’t bothered with the feature, either. As such, if you’re looking to set up some sort of solution, you’re going to need to use a third-party application.
For the purposes of this tutorial, we’ll assume you’ve settled on a handy little app known as Vybe. You can grab it from the Google Play store for free. Once you’ve downloaded and installed it (the process shouldn’t take terribly long), you can set to work customizing your vibration alerts. The interface is smart, sharp, and crisp, in addition to being quite simple to use.
To set up an alert, all you need to do is tap the “record” button, then tap in the sequence. Once you’re done, hit “save” and the alert will be committed to the application’s memory, at which point it can be assigned to any number of contacts of your choice. Unfortunately, Vybe has one rather glaring weakness – there’s no way to name any of the vibration alerts, nor is it possible to tell which contact has been set to which alert. This is, hopefully, something which will be fixed in future releases. In spite of this weakness, Vybe is definitely one of the best choices for setting up custom Android vibration patterns.
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