This one trick will make your smartphone faster

We all want a faster phone experience, so today we'll show you one very simple trick that is guaranteed to make your smartphone faster. There are no apps involved, no tricky fiddly bits and no root permissions required; just 10 seconds of your time and about 15 button presses. Let's do this

What we're going to do is disable the transitions and animations on your phone. These are the settings that control what happens when you swipe from one screen to the next, or one app to another. They also control how quickly popups appear. 

You'll need to enable Developer Options for this trick. / © ANDROIDPIT

If you want more information on what these features do, there's an explanation at the bottom of this article, but if you just want the solution to a faster smartphone, read on.

1. Go to your smartphone's Settings, scroll down to About Phone and tap it.

2. Find Build Number and tap it seven times until you see that Developer Options have been enabled.

3. Go back up to Settings and tap Developer Options.

4. Scroll down to Window Animation Scale and tap it. Set it to 'Off'.

5. Tap Transition Animation Scale and set it to 'Off' as well.

6. That's it.

Want to know what's in the secret sauce? Here's an explanation of these two settings, along with a mysterious third setting that no one seems to understand.

You can change the speed at which windows appear on your phone. / © ANDROIDPIT

What is Window Animation Scale?

Window Animation Scale is the length of time that Android takes to animate a popup window. If it is set to '10x', for example, it will take a long time for a popup window to appear.

To see it for yourself, set Window Animation Scale to '10x', go back up to Settings and then go back into Developer Options. You should see a very slow popup window warning you about messing with things. Now, go back and set it to 'Off' and try again. Much faster, right?

Transition animations can be seen between home screens, app launches or menus. / © ANDROIDPIT

What is Transition Animation Scale?

Transition Animation Scale is basically the same thing, but for transitions between screens, such as between one app and another, or when launching an app from your home screen.

This one is super easy to understand. Set it to '10x' and press the home button. Takes a while, huh? Now, set it to 'Off' and enjoy instant transitions.

Animator Durations control the speed of the 'loading' animation. / © ANDROIDPIT

What is Animator Duration Scale?

This is the third option in the list that nobody seems to understand properly. Changing the settings here doesn't seem to make any visible difference to speed and that's because it doesn't. So what is Animator Duration Scale?

It basically just controls the speed of 'loading' animations. To see it in action, set it to '10x' and launch YouTube (or any other app that takes more than a second to load). See how slow the little circular loading animation is?

If you set Animator Duration Scale to 'Off' and launch YouTube again (be sure to clear it from your Recent Apps list so it isn't saved in cache), you'll see that there is no circular loading animation at all. Setting it anywhere above 'Off' just makes that animation faster or slower, but it doesn't actually speed anything up with regards to the operation of your phone.