Ask HN: What do you think of a “varying ringtone”? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do you think of a “varying ringtone”?

1 pointjimijazz5 comments

Hi all,

I have this buisness idea where I create a way for ringtones to slightly vary on each call, either in rythm, tonality or timbre.

This could be done algorithmically, by ensuring the ringtone does not deviate too much from what one can recognize as your phone ringing, but at the same time to vary over time to keep it interesting, suprising, and not end up as an obnoxious sound.

How does the HN audience feel about this? Would you use it? and would this be feasible to implement in Android and iOS ?

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As a business idea I don't think it would take off. I had a somewhat related project idea to rotate ringtones.

Such an idea can be done on Android, but would have been impossible on iOS (at the time, have not looked into it since).

It was mildly popular for download on the store, but supporting issues on various phones was a hassle, and Android update occasionally changed the required APIs. Currently the project is broken and on the back-burner to get it fixed again. However, it is freely available if you want a look.

https://github.com/chad-autry/rototone

Hey, this is awesome. Thanks for sharing. Happy to know I'm not the first one to think about it. While it may be a niche thing, it proves that there is actually an audience for it. Did you have a price set for it? Did you do any kind of marketing for it?

It is true I didn't market it, so possible it suffered a bit from that. Some of the 'Doesn't work on my device' comments were a bit unexpected (and unsolvable without $$$ to test on the devices), so I didn't want to spend money promoting it with issues. I was charging $3 I think, it has been awhile.

There was another seemingly popular paid ringtone app at the time, but I can't recall what it was. And a search now for 'android ringtone app' now brings up lists of 'Top X ringtone apps of 2018/2019' populated exclusively by free apps.

I don't understand the problem this solves or value it brings. Morning alarms get annoying with repetition, not ringtones. I'd pivot to dynamic/generated morning alarms if I were you

Interesting, thanks for the feedback!

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