It’s a point of constant frustration for me when on call—i actually want three levels of notifications (most notifications show without alert, some vibrate, and pagerduty rings). When awake, i want more notifications to vibrate, but i want all phone calls to ring.

Thankfully the apple watch has addressed this by actually waking me up when i get a call, so i can just turn vibrate + Do Not Disturb on, but it’s so confusing how they market their mobile devices as being for professionals when their notifications settings feel like they haven’t been updated since they were introduced. The resulting notification system (especially Do Not Disturb and the vibrate physical switch) feels like a toy.

> pagerduty rings

iOS has the option to whitelist DnD phone calls. I have Pager Duty on it, my boss, as well as a few trusted colleagues that know to only call if something _needs_ my immediate attention. In addition my family knows that my phone will always ring if you call me twice in a row, and that they can always do this if they need me.

There are times when I do not want to pick up a phone calls. We use to just be able to pretend to not be at home, or to actually leave home to not receive calls. I want DnD to filter out the calls that I would previously screen with an answering machine when avoiding people.

How do you set DND to apply on the phone only?

Regardless, it’s frustrating Apple prioritizes a simple interface over usage. Not terribly surprising for a phone, but again, it’s much less a useful tool for it.

I get what you're saying but you're describing how user interfaces can get really complex and unusable. So, now, for an edge case that the vast majority of people have no need for, you would now have 4 levels of notification, with possibly different behaviors depending upon whether Do Not Disturb is on or not. Whereas many of us were already pretty much fine with turning off most notifications and using DND when appropriate for the others.

I would guess patents held by Google regarding their notifications interactions are part of it.

Isn't this the only one? https://patents.google.com/patent/US20090249247A1/en

AFAICT, Android never even incorporated the designs in this patent.