How to make navigating your Android phone a lot faster

Modern smartphones have a lot of processing power but navigating them can still be quite slow when you think about it. Try to open the app drawer and scroll to your favorite app and open it. Isn’t your finger often faster than the interface? This isn’t because your phone can’t keep up, it’s because of all the animations the operating system insist of showing you to make things pretty.

In this article I will show you how you can disable or change the speed of these animations so that navigating really will be down to the speed of your thumb (and maybe your processor).

In case you missed it, this will only work on Android phones. I’m not very familiar with the iOS operating system so if there is something similar there please leave a comment.

  1. First you need to activate developer mode on your phone. This might sound scary if you are not that tech savy but it’s fine as long as you don’t go changing things you don’t know what they do. To activate developer mode on a Pixel phone you go to Settings -> About phone. Now tap the build number 7 times until it says You are now a developer. If you don’t have a Pixel phone you can find the location for other popular brands here: https://developer.android.com/studio/debug/dev-options
  2. Now you can go to Settings -> System -> Developer options. Activate developer options here.
    Showing the developer options switch being enabled in Android.
  3. Scroll down to the section called Drawing. Here you will have the three options we are looking for:
    • Window animation scale: Controls animation speed when opening and closing apps.
    • Transition animation scale: Controls animation speed when switching between apps or going between screens within an app.
    • Animator duration scale: Controls animation speed for objects, such as moving elements or fading.
      Show the three animator scale options in the developer options for Android.
      You can disable all three of these to get maximum speed but I prefer to set them to .5x. Then you will still have a little bit of a transition but it will still be really quick.
  4. Something extra you can do if you have a phone with a high refresh rate screen is to lock it to the maximum refresh rate of your screen. The option Force peak refresh rate will do this. I tried this for a while and can’t say I noticed a difference, on the upside I didn’t notice the battery life degrading.
    Showing the force peak refresh rate option in the developer options for Android.

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