Comment 10 for bug 1478075

"It's true that with the current UI you can't change the ringtone volume while media is playing. But there's still no explanation here of why that would actually be a problem"

An additional piece of information which may weigh into this discussion (I propose no solutions here) is that of apps and games which play sounds but do not play constant music. This may be because they are capable of playing background music but the user has switched it off, or that the app is not a game but uses sounds for various events. In such a situation, it is often very difficult to decrease the sound volume of the game. If the current foreground app is, for example, a game which plays sounds for events but does not have background music, then it's very unclear what using the hardware volume keys is *expected* to do in this situation. Application sounds obey the media volume setting, not the ringer volume setting (and I assume for this discussion that they will continue to do so, although see below). If the hardware volume keys are used when such a game is the current app, should they adjust the media volume? The phone is not currently playing any media, and there is no obvious direct feedback to be heard when the media volume adjusts (unlike, for example, the music app, where a media volume change is immediately apparent). But if the hardware volume keys adjust the ringer volume when there is no media *playing*, then it becomes effectively impossible to decrease the volume of the game's event sounds. Android and iOS both suffer from this issue, and it is I think at least partially because there are at least two independent volume settings (media and ringer) but they are presented as one context-dependent setting. Maybe separating out the two settings and making them independently adjustable would help alleviate this confusion (at the cost of additional complexity)?