It's especially annoying when you don't look at your phone because you're just making noise for no reason. It's on the same level as playing music through your phone on the subway with no regard for those around you.
I know someone who will sit there for an hour texting people and each text that comes in rings the phone. They're literally staring at their phone and think that they need the ringer on.
That's the problem right there.
but since our phones are ad-delivery platforms, they only give you the minimum amount of flexibility to solve it. So that person is helpless trying to choose between not knowing when somebody texts or having the phone ring all the time. It's not their fault that they don't have any reasonable option.
Three actions (volume button, tap, tap) on my Android to turn my phone from ringer on to silent isn't that bad. And even though I don't have an iOS device, I'd hardly say they're built to be ad-delivery platforms. iOS isn't really in the ad business as much.
Like why do I need to be repeat notified if someone texts me 3 times quickly in a row? We ought to have some kind of an agent system that can handle these things somewhat intelligently. Apple is doing a little better in this regard, but I can't help but feel that in the OSS world we would have had a bunch of solutions to this by now. In a fragmented fashion with terrible usability, of course.
/s
However, I can tolerate it if there's reasoning. If you simply don't care and let a device make incessant irritating noises, now you're just being annoying.
Having the phone on vibrate or the ringer on all the time feels like being way more attached to your phone than having it on silent. Vibrate/ring means the phone gets your attention immediately all of the time. Silent means I decide when I give the phone attention.
Back to the annoyance, I know two people who like to think they're not attached to their device and leave it at home when they're out. But then when I'm visiting and they're out running an errand or something, their phones ding and ding and ding and there's nothing to do about it (since I'm not going to silence their phone for them...). I have lots of stories like this.
Of course, this all stems on me being baffled that someone would go days without checking their phone.
This would heavily annoy me too and is absolutely deserving of criticism. However I think that is a very different problem than having a phone that vibrates in your pocket that somebody occasionally feels because they're sitting next to you or holding your phone (my kids sometimes take pictures for example). The two might seem somewhat similar at a high-level, but the fact that one includes the phone being on the person and the other does not, that seems like a huge difference to me.
This baffles me. Like, 80% of the reason I even have a phone is to be able to communicate/look up needed information when I'm away from home. It's when I don't leave my house for a few days that I might find I missed a bunch of important messages.