Possible Workaround For Those Whose Notification Sound Goes Off Instead of The Ringtone

So I ran into an issue recently when I switched to the Pixel 9. I'll let you know that I moved from a Galaxy S21 Plus to the Pixel 9. Anyway some of the contacts (most) were using the default tone even though I changed the ringtone in the main settings. I found that strange that only some of my contacts would ring in the changed ringtone but not all. So I chatted with the Whatsapp Chatbot. It told me that I could set ringtones per contact if I wanted to. Oh, well great. And it turns out that by checking a few of my contacts' ringtone that it was set to the default tone, which I never set BTW. So even though I chose a ringtone in the main settings somehow the per contact ringtone still pointed to the default ringtone. So it would say "Default (ringtone name)" for most of my contacts. Since I never set a per contact ringtone why would I go through each contact to change this? Isn't there a global setting for the ringtone?

Well, that's what the main settings are for, right? RIGHT? Nope. Then again this could be a Pixel phone thing since it seems like they have some sort of custom ringtone selector. But I'm just putting this out there so people can understand how I solved it, albeit a workaround I think? It might apply to other phones as well.

So here's what I noticed. If you set a ringtone in the main settings it won't affect the contacts. However, while in the main notification settings if you press the 3 dots and press "Reset notification settings" and IMMEDIATELY set a ringtone while still on that page then it will apply the ringtone to all contacts! That's right, if you get out of the screen after pressing Reset notification settings, then come back in and set the ringtone you're back to square one and it won't apply it to your contacts! That's the point. Do it all in one go. Then if you want you can go ahead and set individual ringtones for specific contacts if you have any, but this is optional. This worked for the Pixel 9 so I cannot speak for other phones. And I tried it on two of them.

What the app should do is simply track any changes per contact ringtone and keep them from changing if the global ringtone is changed. That way a user can change the global ringtone and not affect the per contact ringtone. Also they should put a Reset notification settings on an individual contact level so that if the user no longer desires to set custom settings for that contact that they don't have to reset the entire notification settings in the main settings.

And finally a side note that there was no "default" button to set a ringtone in the Pixel 9. There was a "None" option but that would read as silent on the per contact ringtone setting.

Hope this helps someone.