“Silencio” screamed Imelda, Puss in Boots’ adoptive mother, and all the kids froze in silence. “Silencio” screamed my Spanish teacher not so long ago (actually longer than I’d like to admit) when a cell phone rang during the class, a time when it wasn’t that common for this to happen.
Now I have yet to see a movie in a cinema where someone’s phone doesn’t ring or does a noise of some sort. It drives me crazy and I’ve seen this happen in other places too. If only there was an app that could help those poor souls to silence their phones in important meetings, locations, … and THERE is! “Silencify” is an app that does exactly just that and much more. Aside being a constant guardian of how your phone should behave in certain locations or situations (i.e. meetings), Silencify is for your phone what the “Do Not Disturb” status is for Yahoo Messenger. Basically it will completely silence your phone on a schedule (i.e. when you sleep), allowing only important phone calls to come through (using a whitelist).
Here’s a more thorough presentation of Silencify’s features and how those can help you:
- Scheduled silences. You can set-up a scheduled (recurring) date/time when your phone will automatically enter a silenced mode. You have some predefined schedules, such as Week-ends nights and optionally Week-days, but basically any combination you want can be achieved. If you know you’re always in church Sunday morning you can enter that as a fixed schedule and your phone will be dead silenced.
- Calendar entry keyword detection. Get this, Silencify can automatically verify your calendar entries and if it detects certain entries with particular keywords that you define in advance (such as “meeting” or “doctors” or “hangover”) it will automatically silence your phone for that given period of time. It’s like putting Smart in smartphone.
- Always accept or reject. Be it day or night, there are some important calls that you always want to accept (i.e. your wife, kids, Barack Obama). That’s why Silencify has an option to add numbers to a whitelist, which means that even if your phone is in silent mode that call will get through to you and you’ll hear the ring. In contrast, the “Always reject” list is for those of your (wife) relatives that you don’t want to hear. If on that list, your phone will automatically be silenced when a call is received.
- Total silence. You can configure the app to silence not only the calling part of your phone, but every other possible disturbance: your Bluetooth, WiFi, the mobile data transfer, the synchronization schedule or even turn on the Airplane Mode on. Nothing will get through unless you approve it somehow (adding a number to whitelist).
- Loud widget. You can add a widget on your phone’s screen that lets you manually remove the silence vow when you tap on a button.
- Location based silent-ifier. It has an option that you enable and allows you to add specific locations (i.e. such as work, home, cinema, doctor’s office, mistress house, …). Whenever you get within half a mile of those enabled locations, your phone will automatically be silent if you chose to. No more excuses to have your phone ring in the middle of a movie like “Mama” to scare the Bejesus of everyone. A notice though, with this option turned on your phone’s battery might suffer a bit since gps detection is involved.
- Miscellaneous settings. The app offers other useful features too, such as the automatic backup of your Silencify rules, a Master Silence option and Emergency calls.
- Upcoming features. The developer of Silencify already thought of what more you’d like from this app and has some new features ready to be included. The most important one I can think of is the “Driving Mode” automatic silencer, which might even save some lives. Think how many times an adolescent immediately grabbed the phone to text back a reply to an SMS that came in, just because he/she heard the notification sound while driving.
On top of everything, Silencify is free. Displays some ads here and there, but given the fact that the developer worked so hard to develop an app that has features only included in the Professional versions of other less competent ones, I’d say it’s well worth. So if you’ve forgot at least once your phone un-silenced when you were in an important meeting and your boss gave you the look, or being stalked by a late-night caller, Silencify is the perfect solution to your problems.
You can download it from the developer’s website at http://silencify.onbile.com/ or directly from Google Play via: Silencify
The developer of Silencify accepted to answer a few questions for us, so you can read below the full interview:
Q: Can you share some information about yourself with our readers?
A: I’m a developer for mobile applications with experience in Java/Android/iOS, I worked on Silencify in my spare time.
Q: How did you come with the idea to create Silencify, what inspired you?
A: I would say my golden sleep inspired me. Few months back before developing Silencify, I used to be constantly woken up with notifications/calls/SMS etc. I tried a few apps out there which claimed to fix my sleep, but many were paid or had few features, or no active critical bug fixes from the developer, this motivated me to write Silencify.
Q: How long did it take from that idea until the first public release?
A: It took about 2-3 weeks.
Q: Have you developed other apps or is this your first one? Do they target only the Android market or others as well (i.e. iOS)?
A: Silencify is my first personal app, however I have developed many other apps for the company where I work.
Q: With hundred of thousand of apps in the appstore, how do you make people aware of Silencify?
A: My current goal is to promote Silencify on websites like yours and reach your already established user base. I would like to say thanks for promoting Silencify and keep up the good work.
Q: What future plans you have for your Silencify (new features, …)?
A: Yes, definitely I have my own features queued up, also I would like to mention I had 4k+ downloads for my app within 1.5 months of release and lot of user feedback. Few of these new features have come from users. I really appreciate user feedback and have few requests from users in my TODO list too.
Q: What popular apps are an inspiration for you as a developer and why?
A: In terms of popular android apps, few apps like DropBox, Gmail, WhatsApp, Google Drive are an inspiration, because obviously they have some cool features which I use in my day to day life. Other than that there are also new features, bug fixes plus they keep up with the latest UI look and feel, which is what I strive to maintain in Silencify.
Q: Have any tips/advices for other developers that want to start working on an app? Any tools that you consider to be a must?
A: In terms of advice, I would say think of everyday things you feel can be simplified using the computing power you have in your smartphone. It doesn’t need to be very complicated like setting up your own email server, it can be as simple as Silencify where I tried just to fix the sleep problem for myself and many other people like me.
