It took me a while to figure out why most apps still make sounds when the device is muted, but I think I get the paradigm now, or at least this is how it seems to work in practice:

'Mute' is to silence 'push' sounds (ie. email, text messages, phone calls) and the keyboard. The volume control can silence apps (ie. turn down the volume if you don't want to hear an app).

Would it be possible to make Skritter just work off the volume control, and independent of the mute switch? That seems to be what many iOS apps do. I almost always have my iPad muted, and the only app Icurrently have to unmute it for is Skritter.

A vote here for keeping some simple and fast way to totally silence the app - since I currently use it a lot on the train. The current setup of being able to hit the hardware mute switch works great for me. If there was an in-app mute button easily accessible (not buried in settings) then that would be almost as good.

You hold down on the volume down button, that goes down to 0 volume in less than a second :)

We could do this for iPad. Do most people use the mute/volume paradigm on iPad as you describe? Hmm. More opinions are welcome.

I keep the Skritter app on mute, and my ipod volume turned all the way down as well. I'd love to have the sound on, but most of the time when I pull it out to Skritter I'm on the bus or actually teaching a class (just handed out a quiz and need to quietly wait for the students to hand it in) so sound is a no-no.

My initial blanket statement is not as universal as I thought.

Pleco and most music apps play sounds regardless of the the mute setting.
All my games and interactive books/comics respect the mute setting.

IIRC, I suggested this during the Skritter beta, they tried it and then immediately reversed course when most of the other testers said they preferred that the mute switch actually work.

I think the key distinction is that even if Skritter's audio is in some sense being activated intentionally - you're choosing to run a flashcard test which has been configured to play audio - it's also incidental to another activity, like the sound effects in a game; it's not triggered by you pressing a "play audio" button, it's triggered by you doing something else that one might also wish to do without audio.

So there's an ambiguity of user intent - if a user presses a "play this song" or "play this podcast" button then it's quite clear that they want to hear some audio regardless of their mute switch setting, but if a user just picks up their phone and starts reviewing flashcards, they haven't really expressed an intent regarding audio in this particular flashcard session, and in that case the best way to read their intentions is to obey the mute switch.

It might be good to make this a user-configurable setting, though.

Mike's explanation makes sense. Perhaps no change is needed after all.