Manufacturers are constantly striving to offer a fluid user experience for you while using an Android phone. They’re walking a thin line between branding the smartphone with their specifics, and keeping the user experience, and performance, relatively untouched. Needless to say, they don’t always succeed. That’s when you have to think about ways to speed up Android.
Software, as it’s been the case in the past two decades, is also continuously pushing the envelope. It drives hardware advancements, and vice versa. You might end up in a situation where your older hardware has a real problem running newer software. Even if it doesn’t, it might stutter occasionally.
Not to mention that your phone is going to be the fastest when you pull it out of the box. From there on, once you load your apps, and accounts, set it up, it will only become slower and slower.
There’s an easy little trick you can do to speed up Android. There are plenty of times when the phone is perceived to be sluggish, but in reality, there’s nothing slowing it down. Well, there is, if you consider all the animations going on. Google, in general, and manufacturers, are also trying to make your experience as visually pleasing, and unique, as possible. They do that by adding some animations and transitions to the user interface. These take some time, even if it’s not significant; time that slows down app launching and even switching between programs running on your phone.
Luckily you can disable or shorten them to speed up Android on your phone. Good thing about this trick is that it doesn’t require a lot of tinkering and tampering to get it done. We’re going to show you how you can disable animations in order to make your Android device feel faster.
Step 1: Enable Developer Mode
First thing you have to do to speed up Android is enable Developer Mode. You can easily do that by going into your Android smartphone’s Settings. From there, find the entry called System, and the About Phone section within. Even though this step is generic, some manufacturers (and some Android versions) don’t have the About Phone entry in the same place as others. You might need to look for it.
Within the About Phone, locate the Build number entry, and tap on it seven times. This will enable Developer Mode.
Step 2: Disable Animations
Go back to Settings. Once enabled, the Developer Options should be a new option within your Settings. Again, placement for this could be different. For instance, on an Essential PH-1, Developer Options are inside Settings, System, Advanced. It could be directly in your Settings menu, or you’ll need to look for it within the System menu.
Once you find it, go into Developer Options, and locate the Drawing section. This will contain the three entries that you are looking for: Window Animation Scale, Transition Animation Scale, and Animator Duration Scale.
These control all the visual animations and transitions that take place on your phone. Clicking on each of them brings up a menu which allows you to either disable, slow them down, or speed them up. Available options are off, .5x (which is half the time), 1x (which is normal), and all the other options which slow them down, increasing the time it takes to display them.
You can play with the settings to find and choose whichever option suits your needs. Remember, you can always come back and revert to default (which is 1x) should you not like the outcome.
There might be times when you want to completely disable them, in which case go for the Animation off option in all three categories, and you phone will seem a lot snappier.