On Android 6:

1) Press volume button to bring up volume controls

2) Tap the arrow on the right to expand

3) Adjust ring/music/alarm volumes as needed: http://core0.staticworld.net/images/article/2015/05/android_...

Just like he said, that involves touching the screen and opening a menu. There's no predictable way to immediately silence your phone.

You can predictably silence it before it happens with the above method. Just drag the "music" volume to zero.

I'm not sure what solution they're looking for. A single universal volume control where if you turn up a video it means your ringer is now on full blast? 6 volume buttons on the side of your phone to adjust them each individually?

Android's system of adjusting media volume when media is playing and ringer volume when it isn't seems like a reasonably clean solution. It takes a single tap to expand to the three sliders.

Maybe a shortcut where where pressing volume up/down simultaneously mutes everything?

It's not that exotic, you've got a child or a sleeping partner or a boss in the same room and you want to watch a mostly visual video without any unnecessary jingles or other audio cues from disturbing them.

So you reduce the volume, but it only reduced the ringer for calls, which isn't what you want.

As the sibling answer says, newer Androids can do this. One click to display the volume, a touch to see the individual controls and then slide.

Or swipe down the top drawer and tap the Sound setting to Mute.

> A single universal volume control

This is exactly what I want.

Press the volume once, the display has an options "cog" on the right, tapping that shows all the volumes on the device and you can set them to your heart's content.

If you're on a newer version of Android you can actually open up a three-slider volume control that has alert volume, media volume and alarm volume separately.

So, on Android, if you know it's going to blast out, you can't go into settings from the notifications shade and change the volume for Music, video, etc. to a reasonable level? I can on mine...

Yes, this is what I do. It would be nice to use the volume rocker to do that.

How do you expect it to know which volume setting you want to adjust?

It just needs to be smarter about the context. If a video is loading in chrome, 90% of the time the intent is to turn down the volume of the video, it's broken that it waits for it to start playing.

Honestly, the most intuitive option for me would the audio controls should never touch the ringer, bury that behind a menu, rather than switching based on context.

I haven't used Android in a while but that used to be a setting... "Volume controls:" with a selector for what it did... Volume, ringer or both

How about having them not ever adjusting the ringer?

You can always adjust the ringer (something people rarely do -- for quite times there's the "silent" mode anyway) from the UI, and always use the volume buttons for the system's (music, video etc) audio volume.

There's just two buttons. Both have specific purposes.

You can touch the screen to drop the selector, click on which volume you want, and go ahead with using the rocker for that volume selector.

To silence app-audio, I use just: volume-rocker, click on down arrow, click on music icon to mute. That's it.

Just tap the pull-down menu button in the volume dialog and change the appropriate volume slider.

It is even a bigger nightmare if you have chromecast streaming to a TV. Now you have another volume control (which chromecast usually takes priority in this situation). This have been the biggest usability issues I've had with Android.