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With how powerful the chips in our smartphones have gotten, lags and stutters have become something you generally shouldn’t experience anymore. Staying current with the latest Android version and making sure all your apps are updated can help keep things running smoothly. Clearing cache can help with performance, but only in situations where an app’s files are corrupted or bloated. There’s a neat trick buried in Android’s Settings app, though, that can make your phone feel noticeably faster.
All Android phones, regardless of brand or price, let you adjust the speed of system animations. This option has actually been around at least since Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and is one of the first things I change when I set up a new Android phone. You’ll find this in Android’s Developer Options menu, which is hidden by default.
Navigate to Settings > Aboutand look for the “Build Number” option. Depending on the model of your phone, it can sometimes be located under a sub-menu such as “Software Version”. Tap the label seven times, and you should see a toast message “You are now a developer!” Return to the main settings page. You can the Developer options Menu right there, but if not, navigate to system, and you should see it now.
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 are the animation scale settings below the drawing section. Put the Window animation scale, Transition animation scale in the Animator duration scale Values at 0.5x. This will play most animations on your Android phone twice as fast.
How effective is this trick?
Cutting your phone’s animation speed in half doesn’t actually make it better. However, I’ve been using this trick for over a decade and can attest that it definitely makes everything feel faster. Opening your phone and launching an app feels faster, and switching between different apps just as quickly. 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 besides just making the interface feel more alive – they mask short loading times and make transitions between different menus and screens smoother. There have been instances, especially with budget-oriented phones, where I’ve cut the animation speed in half only to make the experience feel worse because the apps and menus don’t load fast enough to keep up.
Some Android skins like Google’s Pixel UI have more prominent 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 don’t want to cut the duration in half. In my experience, however, OnePlus’ flagship phones perform at a different level with this tweak enabled.
Nobody’s stopping you from slowing down system animations either – there’s something soothing about slowly watching each transition and seeing where each element comes from or disappears as you use your phone. One thing to note here is that disabling developer options will reset the animation scale settings back to their default values.