If you’re not satisfied with how responsive Android feels on your phone, you don’t necessarily need to upgrade—instead, there’s something you can do to make any Android device feel faster. The secret involves changing the animation speed of your phone so elements move faster when you interact with them. A swipe to go home will move the window quicker, while swiping between apps will switch swiftly. The keyword here, though, is secret: While adjusting animation speeds might sound enticing, it’s not something Android lets you change in its surface-level settings, as Android Police shows.
How to change your animation speed on Android
To start, you’ll need to enable developer options, which opens up a bunch of hidden settings to play with. For the uninitiated, you’ll need to head to Settings > About phone, then scroll down and tap on “Build number” seven times. You might need to authenticate yourself, depending on your settings. Now your phone will confirm you are a developer, even if you are not, in fact, a developer.
With your new developer title in tow, head to Settings > System > Developer options > Drawing. Under this heading, you’ll see three “Animation scale” options: “Window animation scale,” “Transition animation scale,” and “Animator duration scale.” Tap each of these options, and change the setting from 1x to .5x, since the smaller the number, the faster the animation. You can even turn animations off if you want (but you probably won’t like it).
Of course, each option controls a different type of animation on your phone: “Window animation scale” controls the speed of window animations; “Transition animation scale” controls the speed of transitions, such as when you go back a page; and “Animation duration scale” controls the overall speed of general animations, like the notification shade pulldown. You might find it helpful to test out each option first to make sure each works for you.
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This option doesn’t have to be used for good, either. As pointed out in this Reddit thread on the subject, you could always change someone else’s phone animations speeds to 10x. That way, when they try to use their phone, swiping between windows will feel agonizingly slow. It’s a pretty harmless prank, so long as you fess up quick.
