iPhone · guide

How to change ringtone on iPhone, including for one person

By Alberto Gulotta · Updated 23 September 2026 · 11 min read

The question how to change ringtone on iPhone has a two-tap answer and two more that are harder to find, because they live somewhere other than the sound settings.

The second of those is the useful one and the one hidden in plain sight. A ringtone for a specific person is a field on their contact card. Apple’s instruction starts in Contacts and ends there — so the route to making one person ring differently runs through the person, not through the sound settings.

It also means the setting travels with the contact rather than with the sound screen, and that the same screen offers a separate Text Tone — so a person can have their own ring and their own message alert, set independently.

On the store itself Apple is plain about the arrangement: purchases “are associated with your Apple Account and payment method on file”, purchased tones “appear at the top of the list of sounds”, and store availability “might vary by country or region”. The redownload caveat sits among those ordinary terms, which is where it is easiest to read past — and it is the only one of them that can cost you something.

That is the control most likely to be blamed on the ringtone. The slider under Ringtone is the ringtone’s — Apple’s instruction for it is simply “Adjust ringer volume: Drag the volume slider” — but by default it drags four other things with it, and an alarm that is suddenly too quiet is usually this and not a fault.

The vibration is set on the same screen and is a pattern rather than a switch: “Tap Haptics, then choose a pattern or tap Create New Vibration to record your own.” That instruction is attached to each sound category separately, which is why a text tone and a ringtone can vibrate differently.

And for anybody who wants a tone that does not exist yet, Apple’s documented route is to make one: it links GarageBand for creating a custom ringtone on the iPhone itself. That is the company’s own answer to “can I use my own song”, and it is a different answer from buying one.

The same design, documented independently on the other platform — and one route there that costs nothing. Google’s instructions for a Pixel put the per-contact ringtone in exactly the same place Apple does, and it writes them as steps: “Open your phone’s Contacts app.” “Tap a contact.” “Tap More” then “Set ringtone.” “Choose a ringtone.” “Tap Save.” Not on the sound screen there either, which suggests the arrangement is a considered one rather than an accident of either interface. Where the two part company is the shop. For a tone that is not in the list, Google documents copying a file: connect the phone to a computer, then “In the window that opens, find the ‘Ringtones’ folder.” and “Copy your music file (MP3) into the ‘Ringtones’ folder.” Google puts its own quotation marks round the folder name; they are rendered here as single ones because they sit inside a quotation. Nothing is bought, so nothing can fail to redownload later. That is Android’s arrangement and not iOS’s — but it is the comparison worth having in mind before spending anything in the Tone Store.

The guides below take it three ways: the default tone, the per-contact one, and what happens when the phone does not ring at all.

Not covered here. It will not send you to a ringtone download site. Apple documents two routes — its own store and making one in GarageBand — and both are on the phone.

It will not promise a purchased tone follows you to a new phone. Apple says some previously purchased tones might not be redownloadable, and that sentence belongs before the purchase.

And it will not treat a silent phone as a ringtone fault. Apple’s sound page sends you to Silent mode and Silent mode sends you to Focus, which is a chain worth following before changing a tone. What holds instead is simple: the routes for the default tone and for a contact card are Apple’s own, along with what the ringtone slider governs and the switch that separates it.