I want my phone to still be reachable. I want to receive texts still, as well as calls. I just don't want to be inundated with interrupting notifications while trying to listen to something when I can't easily manipulate my phone.

They could make an optional setting to where after a notification pings, your phone won't ping for subsequent notifications for some time frame after, like, say, 30 seconds. They could also let you set default notification preferences when your phone is connected to Bluetooth in a car or playing continuous audio streams like music, audiobooks and podcasts. Like if I'm in a vehicle with a screen that has popup notifications, maybe that's the only way I want those notifications while in the car. Or maybe while listening to audiobooks, music, or whatever, I may want the notifications to not pause the audio, but play concurrently, or only vibrate instead, or flash my phones flashlight, etc.

There should be other options between accept constant interruptions or cut off all contract from the outside world.

am I the only one here that leaves do not disturb on at all times?

it's the gardener. It's always the gardener

Don't you dare besmirch the good name of Samwise Gamgee!

Right, but you still have to manually change between notification sounds or vibrate only. Would be nice if there was a way to set it so that it did that by default when playing continuous audio streams. Or used other notifications methods like the flashlight strobe, or using your vehicle's screen when connected to it. I will also never need to have multiple pings happen back to back to back when I'm not actively using my phone, so a way to make it only ping once for a notification and ignore subsequent notifications for some time frame (say 30 seconds) when not actively using my phone screen would be lovely.

I want my phone to still be reachable. I want to receive texts still, as well as calls. I just don't want to be inundated with interrupting notifications while trying to listen to something when I can't easily manipulate my phone.

They could make an optional setting to where after a notification pings, your phone won't ping for subsequent notifications for some time frame after, like, say, 30 seconds. They could also let you set default notification preferences when your phone is connected to Bluetooth in a car or playing continuous audio streams like music, audiobooks and podcasts. Like if I'm in a vehicle with a screen that has popup notifications, maybe that's the only way I want those notifications while in the car. Or maybe while listening to audiobooks, music, or whatever, I may want the notifications to not pause the audio, but play concurrently, or only vibrate instead, or flash my phones flashlight, etc.

There should be other options between accept constant interruptions or cut off all contract from the outside world.

Oh lord, hahaha. Crossing my legs at the thought. Nice.

There was a feature I had on android several years ago where you could limit notification sounds by time. You could pick from 1 to like 10 minutes. The first one would ping you and the rest for that timeframe would be silent notifications until the timeframe ended and treated the next one like normal.

Edit: still a feature on the texting app I use, Textra. I like their features so much I paid for it and keep reverting back when trying stock or anything else. I'm sure there's some big flaw I don't know about since it's an old SMS app though.

My ideal fix would be waterboarding people who design apps that ping me every time someone that isn't me reacts to a comment that isn't mine in a group text I didn't start.

I can think of a few ways. If I'm driving, my phone is connected to my cars Bluetooth and alerts me to incoming texts visually with pop up on my dash screen. I would prefer if I could chose to have me notifications default to just a screen popup on the car instead of interrupting audio while they're connected. (the actual pop up blocks literally everything in the screen and never disappears until it is replaced by another popup or you press "ignore", which is terrible design, but that's toyota's fault not my phone's).

And at no time have I ever needed to have my phone ding back to back to back. I would also like the ability to set it to only ding once every, say, 30 seconds (let the user choose the time frame) if i haven't picked up my phone in between. If multiple notifications come up in that time, once was enough to let me know I have something waiting. I'll get to it when I get to it.

As others have suggest putting the phone in vibrate should prevent this issue.

But I think the correct approach is that the sounds should play overlapped. What the parent comment to yours was talking about was the preferred audio playback is paused so the intruding audio can be played, and then the podcast/audiobook will rewind for a second before restarting play. Just mix the audio from both together instead.