What are some cool but underrated Android Features on Android that most people don’t know about? those little things that make life easier but don’t get talked about much. I feel like there’s so much hidden stuff in Android that we miss out on.
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I was just about to say this, it’s a game changer. Some OEMs (Android variants) even have options in the settings to set animation speed or disable them.
Speaking of, if your older phone is ever laggy or feels unresponsive, disable animations entirely. It made my phone feel brand new with how quickly it goes in and out of apps.
i disabled the animations on my old tablet just now. Very nice!
Love doing this when people complain their phone is slowing down due to age
I appreciate this setting still existing, especially because some custom skins/UI can be too slow, but IMHO I prefer a balanced/stock value as the animations nowadays are so polished and smooth that I’d rather use it that way than butchering them with faster speeds…
I am using MIUI right now and it has its own version of this, so I just use “balanced mode”.
When I use AOSP I always use stock because even my SD 865 feels weird when the animation is too fast but the app is still loading, I think it kills the momentum lol.
Fun fact if you set it to 1.5x on a samsung, it behaves like an iPhone lol.
Isnt iOS pretty sluggish with the animations? I heard it was on the slower side (as if to show of the animation)
Yeah the reason Androids feel ‘choppy’ compared to iOS is that android lets you take action without finishing the animation, whereas iOS forces you to watch every animation until you can touch the phone again. This is a general trend with iOS, you do as the OS tells you to.
Oddly, I set mine to 2x because I like the animation being more… Animated. If I wanted speed I would just turn animation off.
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Yeah it’s a shame Google dragged it’s feet so long and unlike all the crap they advertise but then release only. For the US for the next 6 years, they never went loud about this. So much the easiest way to share.
I wonder if it is too hard for Google to convince Apple to implement this with iOS, even in the form of an app…
I just used pairdrop.net a couple hours ago because I was too lazy to install LocalSend in my gf’s iPhone and it was a breeze to use to share a short video from there to my Android device…
I’ve tried it a few times and never gotten it to work. It sees both devices, but the connection times out.
This is not an Android feature. This is a Google feature and I believe it relies on a round-trip through their servers too.
On the calendar, I can set people’s birthdays with a yearly reminder so they think I’m super thoughtful for remembering their birthdays. But the phone notified me.
Happens automatically if you put the birthday on the contact, too
*if you use Google’s Contacts and Calendar services
(I am very much separated from G and my contacts and calendar are hosted on my nas via radicale, so this feature doesn’t exist - but I just made a calendar for birthdays myself, and add when needed)
That’s not an Android feature, every digital calendar does that.
Mine doesn’t (radicale) so…
oops
As a forgetful person this feature is absolutely essential. I put the person’s name and year of birth in the calendar event too.
I had a coworker that had the birthdays of his contacts at the end of each of them, so he would see that date anytime he chatted with them (us?) through WhatsApp.
I don’t question his methods, but that worked for him.
Try other app stores like fdroid
Not an app “store” per se, but Obtainium
That is not an Android feature…
NewPipe, ReVanced patches, screen rotate with the popup, KineStop, and if you’re adventurous: dual boot different ROMs using A/B.
An application like tasker makes you realise the weird and amazing stuff you can do.
What do you use it for?
I’ve had it for a while,
but ended up uninstalling it,
since I could not think of a good use case.I use it to play the Wii Shop Channel theme when I open the Play Store
I’m sorry I made you have to re-download Tasker again now
I have a few routines that I use.
For example,
I have one that auto rotates some apps.
One that sends a notification to my watch when the phone is fully charged.
Another that enables NFC when I open the wallet app and disables it automatically.
Another that enables auto rotate, silences phone, and enables DND when playing games.
Thank you, those are some interesting/good use cases indeed!
I need to re set mine up, but my main use cases were opening a music app and playing music, opening Waze, and turning off text notifications if I connected to my cars blue tooth; and connecting to my VPN if I left my home WiFi.
Something else I wanna try soon is silencing my phones notifications if I’m connected to KDE connect on my desktop, since they should come through on the computer anyway
When I started first using Tasker back in around 2013 or so, I was mesmerized but what you could do with it. This was because at the time, too, I was rooted, so it really changed the possibilities with modes and so forth with Tasker. For example, NFC unlocking the phone when you tapped it to a NFC tag while the screen was OFF. That was killed by Google in Android 5 but before then, it was awesome! Tap on the tag and your phone would perform whatever task you told it do. Over the years, Google and other Android makers have slowly added different functions that Tasker was doing before them.
Since Tasker was taken over by the current Dev, it’s make many leaps and bounds over what it could before and simpler now. My tasks are:
Turn volume up ALL THE WAY for specific contacts and then back to the before volumes after the call. I have an older mother which hopefully live longer than 10 more years, but closing in on 80 years young, she’s going to get more fragile with her age so, my sister who lives near her, can call me in any issues pop up. (I live about 5 hours away). So, it’s essential to know when she’s calling me. On the same theme, when she texts me, I have it announce via TTS that she sent me a text. It’s also handy for when my wife calls me!
The phone restores the volume from silent when unplugged from the power charger in the morning ONLY after 7AM. I work from home and awake around 4:30am daily and around 7 is a good time to return sounds in the home. But, it is also conditional, so if on the weekend, I don’t wake up until 8am), it won’t turn sound on until I unplug it. (NOTE: The tasks to raise volume for the callers will override this mode which is good!)
The phone also turns the volume off at 9pm nightly since there’s no reason to have it make noise after then, all are home and pretty much it’s peaceful time.
The phone also sends a signal to my August Lock to send the unlock command when it put it my back pocket by reading a NFC Tag which contains a webhook to call Home Assistant to give the unlock instruction to the door lock.
When certain apps I define are open, it keeps the screen on all the time. I use this all the time when I’m at the store and running a calculator so it’s always up. A few other apps as well, but not too many.
A few others such as toggling the Private DNS server on my phone (I use dns.adguard-dns.com) on the phone to block advertisements and sometimes it doesn’t work so having a widget to toggle that off and on is super nice instead of navigating to it in settings.
I used to use Wiregaurd (Now on Tailscale), but before then, I had a task which would auto connect me to the Wireguard tunnel on my home network immediately disconnected from my WiFi, this ensured that I was always 100% on my home network. Tailscale does the same thing (If you set it to be always connected to your tunnel) , but I’ve been playing with that for a bit over a year and have pretty much settled there for now. My wireguard Tasker Profile for anyone interested:
Before the lock down of Covid, I used to have a profile which I still keep on which would trigger if I was NEAR a SSID for my work to silence my phone and restore the volume if I was away from it (or if I’m connected to my car’s stereo bluetooth if near the SSID). This worked flawlessly and never worried about stupid app notifications during work which would be frowned on. I occasionally go to the office and forget sometimes it’s triggered. :)
One that I’ve worked on for the last years, so sparingly was making a Google Voice robot which would see which contact you called and then send the calls through Google Voice instead of my phone dialer. I’ve made it work but not all the time, so never have trusted it. (I only give my cell number to my family and very trusted friends, everyone else gets my Google Voice number).
My Voice Robot project which is stale as I’ve had been busy with health issues off and on and life events otherwise:
Overall, your imagination is the limiting factor for what you can do with Tasker, the dev has also made it so you can take 100% control over the phone by making Tasker the device owner which bypasses the need for root. I haven’t done it with my Pixel, but on the Samsung I had, it worked, but broke a work app so I disabled it (Requires a factory reset to enable and also disable it).
If you use the 3 button navigation, there are options for long press of buttons. “Kill foreground app” as back button long-press action is just indispensable when something goes wrong.
Used to use the hell outta that.
Is this only in custom ROMs, or is there a way to do it through normal settings?
No idea, I haven’t used a stock Android system for about 10 years.
Go to Settings and search for “long press action”.
Edit: this setting has been available in Developer Settings in earlier Androids, so maybe if the official rom doesn’t have the proper setting, you can find it there.
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Digital Wellbeing. Enforce the decisions you made about app usage. Honestly it’s kinda saved my sanity, particularly this year.
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Scheduled text messages. This should be in every single messaging app. I schedule reminders for other people, I schedule messages that I think of at ridiculous hours to go out at reasonable times, I even schedule messages so that sometime else reminds me to do something.
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Check out the eye gaze function. Also Action Blocks. They’re both cool assistive tech things that can be helpful, but trying them out shows you how difficult and exhausting it would be to have to use them for every task.
Some small but useful OneUI features for you Samsung users’
- Dual Bluetooth audio: Samsung devices can stream audio to 2 Bluetooth devices at the same time which is very cool when you have friends who want to listen in but don’t want to share earbuds. I use this very often.
- One time passwords for wifi hotspot: Samsung devices can create a otp for hotspot that only works once and stops working the next time you turn on hotspot. Very useful feature that I use all the time too.
- Bypass charging: If you game with your phone, search for game booster setting in advanced setting and turn on Pause USB PD charging to use bypass charging and save on battery health
- Turn off UltraHDR: On OneUI 7, turn off SuperHDR in advanced setting to stop the screen from brightening whenever you scroll through an UltraHDR video (fuck you for this useless flashbang feature Google and fuck you Apple for defaulting to HDR recording)
