Best Android Developer Options Worth Tweaking
Android devices offer a plethora of hidden tweaks and customization options that can greatly enhance your user experience. By enabling these options, you can change audio codecs, enable mock locations, access GPU features, speed up animations, and much more.
To access these options, go to the Settings menu and locate the Developer Options menu. These advanced settings are primarily intended for developers to test their apps and are therefore disabled by default to prevent unintended consequences for regular users.
However, if you have a good understanding of these options and how they work, you can unlock and utilize them to optimize your device’s performance and functionality. It’s important to exercise caution and only tweak settings that you fully understand to avoid negatively impacting your phone’s operations.
Get going
Make the menu visible by going to the phone settings. Then,
1. Once inside, go to “About Phone”.
2. Reach for “Build Number” and tap seven times on it.
3. If required, enter your device password or PIN, which should display a message saying, “You are now a developer”.
4. You will see a new menu – “Developer Options” either inside the “System” menu or above “About Phone” depending on the device.
5. Exciting developer options have just opened up for you to explore.
Here are the top 8 Android developer options:
1. USB Debugging:
This is probably the most used option due to several factors. Enabling this option lets your gadgets connect via USB and send commands to the phone and collect information as well. Utilize the option to install APKs, which enable root access, data recovery process etc.
2. Mock location:
An app like fake GPS Location easily allows you to forge your location. After installing the app, you can go to the developer options to scroll down to the Select debug app for creating mock locations. This permits you to spoof your phone into imagining you are in a place or spot where you are actually not present. However, only GPS coordinates can be faked by this.
3. Animation settings:
Your phone is full of animations. The default animation playback speed can be fiddled with by enabling the developer options. The window animation scale, Transition animation scale and Animation duration scale can be increased or decreased, which sometimes may make your phone seem to perform faster and help to run the battery properly.
4. Stay awake option:
When plugged into a charger, this option prevents your screen from going to sleep. This is very useful when the display demands repeated attention like watching the live score of a game or requiring to keep Twitter or a similar app open for live updates while working. No need to tap the screen frequently.
5. OEM unlocking –
It’s a simple toggle, but turning it on allows you to access an unlocked bootloader. This way, you can root the Android phone and run custom ROMs on it. The phone actually uses fast boot commands to achieve this. However, it’s to be noted that turning the option on makes the phone vulnerable, so you should enable it only to install a custom ROM on your gadget.
6. Disable Absolute Volume:
By default, this option is turned off which makes both the phone and the connected Bluetooth device regulate the same volume. Tinker with it, if the Bluetooth gadget’s volume malfunctions or matches improperly with your phone and sounds very loud or quiet.
7. Dark mode:
You will find a system-wide dark mode option on your phone starting with Android 10. Apart from the compatible apps others will not support it. However, by making use of the ‘Override force dark’ option, the dark mode can be activated in all apps. The option may not work impeccably on each app, but at least it’s good if you detest light modes.
8. Enhance gaming performance:
You can boost the gaming performance of your high-end Android device by force-enabling MSAA. This will help you to get smoother gameplay and much better-quality rendering of in-game graphics. It should be noted, however, that this feature drains the battery rather fast.
Enjoy more power
Other than the options mentioned above there are many interesting and exciting features available for you to play around with. Whether it’s improving your phone’s gaming prowess, spoofing its GPS position, or rooting it, the developer options menu comes about as a very handy and powerful tool which also extends the duration of your fun time for as long as you wish.