You can activate it with just a few clicks.
With the power of the chips in our smartphones, lags and stutters have become something you generally shouldn’t experience anymore. Staying up to date with the latest version of Android and making sure all your apps are updated can help keep your system running smoothly. Clearing the cache can improve performance, but only in situations where an application’s files are corrupted or bloated. There is, however, a neat trick buried in Android’s settings app that can make your phone noticeably snappier.
All Android phones, regardless of brand or price, allow you to change the speed of system animations. This option has actually been around since at least Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and is one of the first things I change whenever I set up a new Android phone. You’ll find it in Android’s developer options menu, which is hidden by default.
Go to Settings > Aboutand look for the “Build Number” option. Depending on your phone model, it may sometimes be found in a submenu such as “Software Version”. Tap the label seven times and you should see a toast message saying “You are now a developer!” Return to the main settings page. You may find the Developer options menu right there, but otherwise go to System, and you should now see it.
You’ll find a seemingly endless list of options inside. It is strongly recommended that you do not change any options here unless you know exactly what they do. What we are looking for is the animation scale settings under the Drawing section. Set it Window Animation Scale, Transition Animation Scale And Facilitator Duration Scale values at 0.5x. This will make most animations on your Android phone play twice as fast.
How effective is this tip?
Adnan Ahmed for Woozad
Halving your phone’s animation speed doesn’t actually make it perform better. However, I’ve been using this tip for over a decade and I can confirm that it definitely makes everything snappier. Unlocking your phone and launching an app feels faster, as does quickly switching between different apps. I’ve gotten used to this snappier feel over the years, so not being able to change the animation speed on iOS was one of the first things I noticed when I switched to an iPhone.
That said, animations serve another purpose than just making the interface more lively: they hide brief loading times and make transitions between different menus and screens smoother. There have been instances, especially with budget phones, where I cut the animation speed in half only to have a worse experience because apps and menus weren’t loading quickly enough to keep up.
Some Android skins like Google’s Pixel UI have longer animations than others, so using this trick to speed things up can make a noticeable difference. In contrast, OxygenOS on OnePlus devices has slightly faster animations by default, so you may not want to cut their duration in half. In my experience, however, OnePlus’ flagship phones perform at a different level with this setting enabled.
Nobody’s stopping you from slowing down the system’s animations, either: there’s something calming about watching each transition unfold slowly and seeing where each element comes or disappears as you use your phone. One thing to note here is that turning off the Developer Options toggle resets the animation scale settings to their default values.
