How to Finally Turn Down the Ringtone Volume on Your AirPods

You turn on your favorite music on your AirPods when someone decides to call you. The ringtone that matches the volume of the music plays so loudly that you wonder if it has damaged your hearing. Alas, you have no choice but to prepare your ears whenever you use your AirPods. After all, there is no way to separately control the sound volume of your wireless headphones when listening on your iPhone, right? It wasn’t – until now.

Update your iPhone first

Before you can use this feature, you must update your iPhone to iOS 16.4. It adds the ability to control the volume of alert sounds on your AirPods, along with a few other useful improvements . This new AirPods feature will only appear after you install an update.

How to turn down the alert volume on AirPods

After installing iOS 16.4, connect your AirPods to your iPhone. (You can do this by simply wearing your AirPods.) Now open Settings on your iPhone and the settings page for your AirPods will appear between your name and Airplane Mode.

Tap the name of your AirPods, then select Accessibility . Scroll down and move the Tone Volume slider to the left to decrease the volume of sound effects played on your AirPods.

What changes when you adjust the tone volume

For now, this setting does a few things very well, but there are still a few limitations you’ll have to live with. When you wear AirPods, a sound is played to tell you that they are connected to your iPhone. Decreasing the volume of the tone will decrease the volume of that sound effect. When you receive phone calls or calls from other applications such as WhatsApp, the volume of the ringtone also decreases.

However, at the time of writing, this setting does not reduce the sound of message alerts. It also doesn’t reduce the keystroke sound effect that plays when you type on your iPhone.

These limitations are disappointing, but we hope that Apple will fix these shortcomings in a future update. Until then, keep your iPhone in silent mode to turn off alert sounds for texts and keystroke sounds. You will still hear the connection sound effect and ring tone.