[Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] roy92:
I have a Moto Z2 Play with Nougat 7.1.1

I jumped directly from Kitkat (Cyanogen OS which my old phone had and which I never updated as it was very buggy update to Lollipop and I wanted for MM which never came) to Nougat when I bought the Z2 Play. It's mostly a positive change except for the notification settings. I know it's been discussed at length how Google messed up the notification settings on Lollipop and the trend has continued in Nougat too.

So now to my issue with it. I have currently set ringtones at full volume and Notifications on silent by selecting default notification ringtone as "None" as I don't want to hear a chime on every notification that comes through as most of my notifications are News feeds. Whenever l recieve a notification my phone vibrates so I assume there's no setting to customize Silent/Vibrate by default for all notifications and also individual app unless the app itself has implemented it in its settings like Textra and merely selecting no notification ringtone sets it to vibrate unless I go to individual app settings and set on the toggle "Show Silently". It is quite convoluted really.

Now what I want to achieve with the way my phone acts on notifications is something like this:

I want the to set a default notification ringtone and I want to set some notifications to vibrate and some to silent which I simply cannot do unless the app provides its own settings of silent/vibrate.

I want the Reminders and Events set in the Google and Calendar app to have a notification ringtone even when in default settings I have set notification ringtone to "None" but they rely on default notification settings. Some apps like Textra provide their own so is it really hard for Google's own app to do the same. This way I can set a different ringtone too than the default one. So I would like to know of a way to do so.

And honestly why aren't Reminders relying on Alarm sound i.e. if alarms are allowed to make a sound Reminders should too. It is really frustrating. I missed a reminder like this today because I wasn't aware of the convoluted way Nougat handles all this.

Kitkat had the best implementation. It had a separate slider for notification sounds too.(Cyanogen OS had one).

What I think is a better implementation is allowing to set a default ringtone in Sounds settings and then in individual app's notification settings separating the vibrate part from the "Show Silently" option. This would allow me to achieve my goal of having a ringtone for some apps, vibrate for some and silent for some. And it would solve my problem of having a sound when I have set a reminder in the Google app and have set default notification ringtone to "None".

The best implementation of course would be to set a default silent, vibrate or ringtone for notifications and then have granular control for each app i.e have a list of all apps and allowing to choose from Silent, Vibrate or ringtone for each app which would override the default.

Also why not allow to change the default sound that the volume rockers control. In Google's own YouTube app volume rockers change the notification volume and not the media volume which is again very frustrating.

Sorry for the long post and rant. I really wish Google fixes this but I doubt it.