In the hidden developer settings, users can turn down the animation scales. This makes Android smartphones significantly faster. TECHBOOK explains step by step how this works.
It doesn’t matter whether you own the newest or the oldest Android smartphone – there’s always a faster way! And especially with increasing age, the performance of the smartphone decreases noticeably. A secret menu offers the right adjustment screws to get a little more performance out of the device. TECHBOOK shows how it’s done!
Unlock developer options and make Android faster
In order to be able to change the secret functions, you must first activate the developer options. Although these can be found in every Android smartphone, they remain hidden from the user by default. A detailed guide for those trying to get into the hidden menu for the first time can be found here. For everyone else as a refresher:
Open Settings and scroll to the bottom. Tap there over the phone (on some devices: device information) and scroll to the bottom again or tap software info. Now tap the as often as you like build numberuntil the hint You are now a developer! appears. Normally you have to tap the number seven times.
Back in the settings, there is now the area at the end developer options.
caution: Playing around with the developer options can render the smartphone unusable.
Which settings can improve the performance of the device?
Here we present two different approaches on how to make your Android smartphone faster:
1. Window animations, transition animations and animator time
These settings allow you to specify how long window opening animations, window transition animations, and all other animations should last. By default, the animations are displayed with 1x (1x) duration. So if the animation scale is set to 0.5x is set, all animations are only displayed in half the time. As a result, the operation when opening and changing apps appears much faster. If you don’t mind that animations are completely missing, you can switch them off completely. This makes the operation of the Android device even faster overall, but the transitions are no longer as smooth as with the animations.
2. Background Process Limit
While the animation settings will always affect the speed of your device, limiting background processes only makes sense in certain cases. In general, the following applies to the standard limit for Android: the more RAM, the more apps can remain active in the background. However, the user can limit the number of background processes or even set them to 0 completely. This can be helpful on smartphones with little RAM, for example if you want to open a complex game, since it then has more resources available.
After the gaming session has ended, the default limit should be re-enabled. Incidentally, background processes such as GPS tracking and e-mail synchronization remain unaffected by the limit. So you will continue to receive emails and push notifications.
Also interesting: How much RAM does my smartphone really need?
Be careful when using developer options
It should be noted that with modern high-end smartphones with a lot of RAM, limiting the background processes is not always advisable, as this removes apps from the cache and has to be reloaded when used again. This not only consumes a lot of power, but also time and is therefore usually not useful when it comes to making the Android smartphone faster.
The same goes for the option Do not save actions. This should not be activated under any circumstances, otherwise the smartphone will become more of a “dumb” phone. Enabling this option will delete all activities immediately when the user closes them. The result: longer loading times when switching between apps and shorter battery life.