You've always been able to change it for built in applications (messages, mail, phone, etc.). I assume the above poster was joking? Or maybe there's some nuanced feature they added around it recently.

You could change the defaults for a number of things, but not the miscellaneous stuff. The “default” category is new.

It’s really weird, because Apple has been selling tones forever, and they had a tone selection component already. It’s like someone just never prioritized the day of work in their jira backlog.

You could change certain notification sounds, like for iMessage, the built-in mail app, ringtones, etc. Individual apps could set their own custom notification sound as well, or enable a setting that allowed users to change them. But there was also a default, “general” notification sound set by Apple that would be used by any app that hadn’t specified a notification sound, and that could not be changed by the user. It was perhaps the single most annoying thing when I switched from Android.

More specifically, it looks like the change came in iOS 17.2 after Apple changed the default notification sound for everyone in iOS 17 from the one they’d used for years. I guess enough people hated the change and wanted to go back that they finally gave users an option to pick their own.

Still can’t change the Apple Watch default sound, apparently.