Your iPhone alarm and ringtone don’t have to share a volume slider anymore

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iOS 27 finally delivers a feature iPhone users have requested for years: independent volume control. Under the new settings, your alarms, timers, and notifications no longer share a single slider.

It never made sense to treat high-priority alerts and background notifications the same way. Because everything was tied to a single slider, making a minor adjustment to your daytime audio levels meant risking a missed wake-up call later.

Now, Apple is separating these sounds instead of bundling them together. It's a simple, long-overdue quality-of-life improvement that finally makes managing your iPhone audio practical.

Download the iOS 27 beta if you haven't yet

This feature is currently available only in the iOS 27 developer beta. If you haven't installed it yet, you can get it now.

Register as an Apple developer if you don't already have an account; it's free. Then open Settings, go to General, Software Update, Beta Updates, and select iOS 27 Developer Beta. Your iPhone automatically downloads and installs the beta.

How to use independent volume controls

Go to Settings and open Sounds & Haptics, then look for "Match Ringtone Volume" and toggle it off. Once disabled, you'll see separate sliders for ringtone volume, alarm volume, and system alert volume.

Adjust each slider independently to set the levels you want. You can keep your ringtone quiet while setting alarms louder, or mute notifications without affecting calls. Wake-Up alarms set through the Bedtime app are managed separately.

If you prefer the old unified approach, keep the "Match Ringtone Volume" toggle on.

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Kaycee is Tom's Guide's How-To Editor, known for tutorials that get straight to what works. She writes across phones, homes, TVs and everything in between — because life doesn't stick to categories and neither should good advice. She's spent years in content creation doing one thing really well: making complicated things click. Kaycee is also an award-winning poet and co-editor at Fox and Star Books.