Android
How to Turn Off Severe Weather Alerts on the Galaxy S6
When bad weather or a big storm is headed your way, most likely the Galaxy S6 has some severe weather alerts that go off at full volume and can be extremely frustrating, not to mention frightening if you’re not expecting it. This guide explains how to disable all or most of the severe weather and other alerts on the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge.
If you’re like me you’ve probably been awoke in the middle of the night to your phone going at full volume and vibrating so loud it’s scary. This is a severe weather or emergency alert. They’re required by the government, but can be disabled.
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Emergency alerts or severe weather warnings are sent to wireless devices from a few different sources. These can be government officials, local and state safety agencies, FEMA, the FCC, the National Weather Service or even Homeland Security. The Galaxy S6 even gets Presidential Alerts as well, which is the only alert that cannot be disabled. Read on for the quick how to instructions.
Almost all smartphones have severe and emergency notifications, alarms or alerts, but Samsung’s seem to be the most abrupt and loud. The first time it happened I thought my Galaxy S5 turned into a Transformer, was blasting noise at full volume, and was in the middle of the night. If you don’t want this to happen, disable those alerts.
The Samsung Galaxy S6 (and most Galaxy devices) have four different alerts. Presidential, Extreme, Severe, and AMBER alerts. All of them but one can be disabled.
Read: 65+ Galaxy S6 Tips & Tricks
We’d recommend users leave all of these important alerts enabled for their own safety, but if you want to get rid of them we’ll tell you how. Whether they’re waking users up at night or you simply don’t want to be bothered by these extremely intrusive alerts, read on for the instructions.
Instructions
Controlling the emergency and weather alerts on the Samsung Galaxy S6 are managed through the text messaging application called “Messages”. Users will need to head to the stock messaging app, then tap the “More” button in the top right corner, then select “Settings“. This brings up a menu of options, and you’ll need to navigate to “Emergency alerts“.
In this menu shown above and below you’ll be able to manage all of these alerts and alarms, play a preview and hear just how crazy loud it actually is, and disable the ones you don’t want to deal with or ever hear again.
Click on Emergency alerts, then tap Emergency alerts again, and you’ll now be in the area where all four alerts are shown. Each one has a simple on/off switch, and you can turn off three of the four. The only one that can’t be turned off is Presidential alerts.
Simply touch the slider and turn off Extreme, Severe and AMBER alerts if those are what you want turned off, and you’re all done. These settings are oddly hidden and hard to find, but now you’ve turned them off, they’ll never be able to wake you up again.
Being in Las Vegas we don’t have crazy weather so I don’t get any of these alerts too often, but occasionally a severe weather alert for windstorms will go off. That’s the only one I’ve disabled. Users can choose what they want to keep turned on, and what they want turned off.
Steve
08/19/2015 at 5:47 pm
Nope. You’ll have to go into the app drawer, find “Emergency Alerts” and disable them from there. May be new on 5.1.1