How to Make My iPhone Ring When Do Not Disturb is Enabled

[Updated on January 2017]

Backup call notifications are especially useful for iPhone users. Why? Unlike Android users, iPhone users are not able to set important push notifications to ring when Do Not Disturb is enabled. However, they are able to receive sounds and vibrations from specific contacts.

With iOS 10, Apple introduced the Emergency Bypass option. Please check your current iOS version. Go to Settings > General > About and check the number after Version. If your phone is running an older version than iOS 10, we recommend you to, whenever/if possible, to update your system. If you don’t want to update (or can’t), please read the second part of this article.

1. Emergency Bypass — iOS 10 or newer

Go to Contacts and open or add the ‘CarLock Alert’ contact you have created (if not, read more here).

Tap Edit > Ringtone and enable Emergency Bypass for this contact.

iOS 10 — Enable Emergency Bypass

Now, backup call notifications and/or backup SMS notifications will get through even when Do Not Disturb is enabled.

2. Allow Calls From Group — iOS 9 or older

Add the ‘CarLock Alert’ contact you have created (if not, read more here) to a special Group of allowed contacts. If you are already using the ‘Allow Calls From‘ feature, all you need to do is to add the ‘CarLock Alert’ contact to this special group and you are done. If you are not familiar with this feature, continue reading.

Allow Calls for the Favourites Group

Open ‘CarLock Alert’ in Contacts and tap on ‘Add to Favourites‘. Go to Settings and tap on Do Not Disturb > Allow Calls From and select ‘Favourites‘ from the list.

Allow calls form Favourites group

Now, your phone will ring anytime you receive a call from a contact on your Favourites list, even when ‘Do Not Disturb’ feature is enabled.

Allow Calls for a Custom Group

If you don’t want to use Favourites list for ‘Allow Calls From’ feature, you can create a new contact group. (Note that you can only set to allow calls from only one group.)

Browse to iCloud, log in with your Apple ID, and click on ‘Contacts‘.

Open iCloud Contacts app

At the bottom left corner click on ‘+’ and ‘New Group’.

Add new group to Contacts

Give this group a name. For example, we will name it ‘CarLock’.

The newly created group

All you need to do now is add the ‘CarLock Alert’ contact to this newly created group. Click on ‘All Contacts‘, find the CarLock Alert contact and drag it to CarLock group.

Move CarLock Alert contact to CarLock group

On your phone go to Settings, and tap on Do Not Disturb > Allow Calls From and select ‘CarLock‘ from the list.

Allow calls form CarLock group

Now, only calls from ‘CarLock’ group will be allowed to ring when ‘Do Not Disturb’ feature is enabled. Learn more about Do Not Disturb feature here.

(If you use a Mac OS X computer, you can also create a custom group and manage contacts with the Contacts OS X app.)

If you get stuck anywhere or have any questions, visit our help center carlock.co/help for more information.

The CarLock Team