I guess there aren’t too many in Maine. First time I’ve heard it!
Yes, the first time we got them it was late at night…and all our phones went off. Wow!
We live in a large city so we get them often. It was on at least two year old version before. It was scary the first time all phones went off. We turned it off after that.
Why turn off the Amber alert?
Don’t know if it’s gotten any better, but it goes off any time and anywhere. Can you imagine being in the theater, or church,or other place where having it go off really loudly would not be appropriate? Or being woken at 2 am?
They really should have a notification without the loud sounds. Maybe they have, it’s been so long since I turned them off, I forgot about those alerts.
Yes, the sound is VERY shrill. There is no option to get rid of the sound - I looked it up online.
It’s a shame, it kind of defeats the whole purpose!
If you turn the sound off, like you are supposed to do in theaters etc., the alerts will be displayed silently.
That’s good to know. Maybe I’ll turn them back on then. I almost always have my phone on vibrate mode. I wonder if way back when this first happened to me, that wasn’t the case…(or maybe it was just a rare time it wasn’t on vibrate)
Settings>Notifications >scroll to the very bottom there are government alerts, turn off AMBER Alerts.
The one time it went off, the sound scared me to death and it was hours away from us. I get notifications from my local news, they are very prompt sending out alerts if there are any in my area.
It can only be on or off, the sound is too obnoxious especially when it’s not even in my area.
The amber alerts and emergency alerts still go off in church and in theatres, but no worries, they go off on every single phone in that place and create quite the disturbance, without embarrassing any one individual. We went out to eat recently as thunderstorms we rolling in. Every phone in the restaurant went off at once with the emergency alert and it might as well have been tornado sirens.
I had one of those emergency alerts go off the other day for a dust storm. Freaked me out… I thought the Russians were launching nukes at us or something, lol.
@fractalmstr, thanks for the instructions
Thanks for the post about changing the Home key press. I also got several “reminders” to add a credit card number to my Wallet. I think I found a way to turn that off, since I haven’t received another one since I played with something in Settings. I’m a little (okay, maybe more than a little) leery of giving my phone much access to financial data.
Yup, dinosaur here…
Such a helpful thread! Thanks for the tips.
I just updated yesterday on my 5. I’m fine with everything except having to press that stupid home button up to 5 times to be able to put in my passcode. That’s insane. Sometimes it will work with pressing “only” 2 times, but not often. So annoying. And since it’s a 5, the workaround in settings doesn’t apply. I guess I’m stuck with it. 
@Barbalot It will take a day or so to get the timing on pushing the home button just right. Our family has three phones without a passcode and one with. (They are all a 6). It did take me about a day to figure out that I couldn’t do it too fast or it wouldn’t work. A pain, to be sure, but it’ll get easier. I’ve had the update since the day it came out.
I have a 6 and I always just rest my thumb on the home button to open (since it reads my thumbprint). Is this going to change if I update to IOS 10?
Yes- you now push down on the home button.
Now that I’m on my phone, I realize I already click the home button to wake it. Then continue to rest my thumb or swipe. So what’s different? What’s the fuss?