One of the biggest complaints, by far, about Lollipop has been the lack of Silent mode. In versions of Android prior to Lollipop, you could long-press the power button and get into silent mode or vibrate mode, where your notifications and such would come in, but it wouldn’t make a noise. Which is great for meetings and such. You could also just press the volume down key until it got there. Easy, right? Well in Lollipop you can press the volume down key and it’ll go to vibrate and stop there. No silent mode. You could also use the Do Not Disturb functionality, where you can allow no notifications to come in, or just priority ones. But that still doesn’t solve the case of silent mode, as you still want your notifications to come in. This has been the #1 most complained about “feature” in Android 5.0 Lollipop.
This week, Google started rolling out Android 5.1 Lollipop. Which brings a ton of new features to your device, as well as tweaks for Android 5.0 Lollipop. We were hoping that Google would bring back silent mode, but it appears that they haven’t.
While Google didn’t bring back Silent mode, they did change up the do not disturb functionality a bit. Now you can set it to snooze all notifications until your next alarm. In both the None, and Priority modes. However, we’re hearing from Reddit users, that this only works if you have an alarm set in the next 12 hours. But you can still set it to None or Priority until your downtime ends, which is also very convenient. There’s also a few UI changes in that screen. For instance, in Android 5.0, it only said “None” or “Priority”. Now Google has added their icons – which will be shown in the status bar – above the names. So when you see that icon in the status bar, you’ll know exactly what it is.
So still no Silent mode. That sucks, but we have been seeing the OEMs add it back into their Lollipop updates. So perhaps Google will be adding it in a future update? We can only hope, right?