Maybe it is in China and India, though. I shudder to contemplate the complexity of that switching system, but ... astonishment awaits..?
I think there has to be some dramatic oversimplification in the description though. Telecom signaling is still a network level event, even in mobile networks. The receiving network does not typically provide audio to the caller until the call is complete.
But hey, what a terrible idea! I'm glad to have been old enough in that period (2004-2008) that no one I knew would foist such a thing on a caller.
It’s been many years since I’ve encountered it, but was quite scummy because while you’re waiting for the other person to pick up, you’d hear some music and then a voice over saying to press a number now to add it to your own number, for a recurring fee of course.
I wouldn’t be surprised if many of the people paying for it didn’t intentionally “sign up”, but are just not educated enough to understand what happened or notice their prepaid credit being slowly whittled away by rubbish like this.
The amount of worthless “value added services” pushed onto the poorest here by cellphone service providers is sickening.
like "at the tone press 42 to get through"
except you don't need to provide the instructions, people know to do it.
I sort of agree with you. A few years ago, I joined a new team at work that had a really bad on-call rotation (lots of tech debt, bad TSGs, etc.). I got paged in the middle of the night many times, and I was always stressed about how the hell to resolve the issues. So I developed a bad stress reaction to my ringtone.
After I left that team, I changed my ringtone to the theme from Mr. Roger's Neighborhood. It always makes me smile now when I get a phone call.
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/06/17/ios-26-use-as-ringtone-...
Not sure if this issue persists because I'm boring and am still using the same ringtone I made back in 2011 :v https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNSHhrYsudI
gbsplay -qqq -o stdout "Gameboy Camera (1998)(Nintendo).gbs" 48 48 | \
sox -t raw -r 88.2k -e signed -b 16 - -t wav - | \
oggenc - -t "Trippy-H" -a "Hirokazu 'Hip' Tanaka" -l "Pocket Camera" -c "ANDROID_LOOP=true" -o Trippy-H.oggI liked having ringtones for certain family members, as a parent I usually leave my ringtone on (because if my teen is giving me an actual phone call it’s usually something wrong with the car she is driving so it’s high stakes), but anywhere out with the family it’s on vibrate.
In Android land we haven't got quite that ease of use, to my knowledge, however, I always set a song from my music library of MP3 files to be the ringtone, only changing this when I get a new phone every few years.
For me, a custom ringtone means it is my phone and not someone else's that is ringing. This means that I do answer, even if quite distracted, and this has been very helpful at times. I have tried a few songs over the years, and a relatively calm intro helps, so, to others, it sounds like music easing in rather than a ringtone. I can catch it before the bass drops.
I assume the grass is always greener in the land of Apple, but, it surprises me that they don't make custom ringtones easy. I thought Apple was for the creative types and the free thinkers that would care for such things.
Re the article, just thought I should share an intrusive thought: crazy frog had a p3nis. Once noticed, it cannot be unnoticed. :Shudder:
I always thought Apple was for people that thought customization and configuration should be avoided. Apple will pre-configure it in the optimal way and determine which things you should be allowed to do.
You need to manually open the phone entry in iTunes and look for the tones category in there, and drag the files into it. You used to be able to put the tones directly into iTunes, but now it's a matter of dragging the files directly to the phone's tone category itself.
The solution for that is to record a few seconds of silence, save that as an MP3 and set that as the default ringtone. Then, select whatever ringtone you actually want to have to the few contacts you actually want to get calls from. Your phone never bothers you when spammers call, but you get pleasantly notified whenever a call from someone you care about comes in.
1. Downloading MP3s stopped being something easy and free around this time.
2. While the popularity of iPhone was exploding, Apple didn't allow you use any MP3s as ringtones, even if you went through all the steps to get your MP3 files into your iPhone. The Apple walled garden said no, you're holding MP3s wrong, and that was the end of it.
and apple saved people from that...
but then at some point, apple music came along and deprecated local music. (enough that many people were confused and switched to apple cloud music)
Also 2006: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMupng6KQeE “'Cause over there there's broken bones / There's only music so that there's new ringtones”
And disappointed to see an article spend so much time talking about Crazy Frog with zero mention of Crazy Frog's penis lol https://annoyingthing.net/wiki/Censorship
Students were pissed. The lecturers were said to be marketing suits, according to classmates who attended. I imagine they saw an untapped goldmine and were excited to share the good news. The audience, however, was not the target market for such a pitch.
I never heard of any other talk being so misaligned with the school’s mission, so I guess they got the feedback and learned to properly vet presenters after that.
Today, I consider anyone who isn’t an emergency responder with a phone that makes noise a selfish asshole. I think a large segment of the population agrees. My, how times have changed.
You’re probably getting a lot of false positives. Is it ok to answer a vibrating phone around you, or do I need to leave the vicinity first?
A sample of bad ringtone (auto-tuned baby crying) which was trending back then (2007-2008) was [1]. Thankfully I never used it.
The decline in sales seems to match up with the rise in popularity of smart phones.
treetalker•2d ago
Dilettante_•7h ago
[1]https://youtube.com/watch?v=nRpSRP0l4bo
linohh•5h ago
JKCalhoun•6h ago
nytesky•3h ago