Android could finally support unique ringtones for each SIM card

Dual-SIM smartphones have been around for the better part of forever, but Android’s still working to enhance the multi-SIM experience for users, with improvements like the split signal bar only showing up last year. One dual-SIM upgrade users have been craving is a way to assign a different ringtone for each of your lines, and now it looks like Android could finally be getting ready to give us just that.

The ability to set a different ringtone for each of your SIMs is already a feature offered by certain manufacturers, like Motorola, but Android has lacked similar support at the system level. At least, so far it hasn’t had any option like this, but with this week’s release of Android Canary 2604, we’ve got our first hint of it on the way.

None of this functionality is live just yet — not even in the new Canary release — but the appearance of these text strings clues us in to what Google’s working on:

Even without seeing a polished UI, that “unique” and “specific” language pretty clearly communicates that we’re looking at a way to give each of our SIMs its own ringtone. Presumably, this applies to eSIMs as well as physical SIM cards.

But what’s much more difficult to speak to with any certainty right now is Google’s timetable for actually delivering this option. If it were working in Canary, we’d be prepared to expect its debut maybe in Android 17 — but as things stand now, we’d only be guessing.

Considering how many users of dual-SIM phones have been craving this kind of support — and for so long — we really hope that Google makes implementing this a priority sooner rather than later.