iOS 26’s Ringtone Update Is the Customization Win We Needed
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In an age when texting and social media seem to have outweighed good old-fashioned phone calls, perhaps ringtone customization isn’t as popular as it once was. Nevertheless, Apple is making it easier to add a bit of whimsy to your incoming calls in iOS 26 with a long overdue update that vastly simplifies creating custom ringtones.
The iPhone has supported custom ringtones since the beginning, but the initial implementation seemed like little more than a naked attempt to sell us more stuff. Not long after reviewing the original iPhone, iLounge Editor-in-Chief Jeremy Horwitz called it “one of Apple’s worst decisions of 2007,” requiring early iPhone adopters to purchase ringtones “at a ridiculous price through iTunes.” There were ways to hack your own ringtones onto an iPhone, but those weren’t for the faint of heart.
Thankfully, Apple relented a few months later with an update to GarageBand ’08 and iTunes 7.5 that let users turn their own creations into iPhone ringtones. That made it possible to create custom ringtones, but the process still wasn’t as easy as it should have been.
As Apple moved the iPhone away from a tethered connection, it also brought ringtone creation into GarageBand for iPhone. However, that still required you to import your audio into the app, edit or trim it appropriately, and then re-export it.
Other methods were even more convoluted, as we once shared in our 23-step guide on How To Make Free Ringtones for iPhone.
Thankfully, it looks like someone at Apple has used the transition to iOS 26 to deal with a few of these longstanding annoyances that arguably should have been addressed years ago. Last week, we shared how iOS 26 will finally let you change your snooze timer, and now it’s about how Apple is also making it way simpler to use custom ringtones.
These are both things we can’t believe took 18 years, but as they say, better late than never. The new process is so simple that we can describe it in only three steps:
- Find an appropriate MP3 or M4A audio file in the Files app.
- Select it and tap Share.
- Select Use as Ringtone from the share sheet.
Both MP3 and AAC (M4A) files can be used for this. Other formats may also be supported, although I didn’t try any. You still won’t be able to use Apple Music tracks as these are copy-protected, and the idiosyncrasies of the music industry likely mean Apple would need to pay extra licensing fees to let you use them as ringtones.
The only catch is that the file must still be less than 30 seconds long to be used as a ringtone. If it’s longer, you’ll get a message telling you so.
That means you’ll still need to turn to a third-party app to trim longer songs. There’s no standard app for doing this on the iPhone; however, QuickTime works well for this on the Mac, and it’s easy enough to access the result on your iPhone if you’re syncing your Desktop and Documents folders via iCloud.
That limitation is a bit annoying, but it’s also reasonable. Simply using the first 30 seconds of a song wouldn’t necessarily give you the ringtone you want. Who knows, maybe Apple will put Apple Intelligence to good use in a future iOS release and intelligently analyze songs to pick the best part for a ringtone. We can always dream.
