Adjust or Disable Animations to Speed Up Your Device

If you feel like your device has slowed down over time, you do have the option to decrease the animation speed or disable them entire to make it seem faster.

This is one of those things where it’s all perception and it doesn’t do anything to the performance of your smartphone. Since Android 5.0 Lollipop, Google has put a major emphasis on animations within Android. This was a highly debated change as some feel that animations take away from the work that the smartphone or tablet needs to do(or that the user wants to get done). Others enjoyed it as soon as it was introduced and then even more grew to enjoy it over time.

This little tweak is something that was possible way before Lollipop was released, so feel free to try it on older versions of Android as well.

I actually used this tweak back in 4.4 KitKat and thought that I would continue to use it in Lollipop. I’m one of those that started to enjoy the default animation speed and the new animations that Google added to Android. I still go back to it every now and then but I just end up missing the animations and convince myself to enable them again. You have the choice to do whatever you want with the animations. If you don’t want them at all, then you can simply disable them entirely. If you just want them to be faster, then you can cut the speed of the animations in half. If you really enjoy the animations and want them to go slower, then you can even do that by increasing the number.

Adjust Animation Speed

1. Enable Developer Mode
2. Launch the Settings and Tap on the ‘Developer Options’ Option
3. Scroll Down Until You See These Options. . .
4. Window Animation Scale, Transition Animation Scale, Animator Duration Scale
5. . . .Then Tap on the First One
6. Lower, Increase or Disable This and Then Tap on the Second One
7. Continue This Process Until All Three are Adjusted

Explanation

Since this feature isn’t readily available in the Settings app, you’ll need to enable Developer Mode to see it. Once enabled, go into the Developer Options section within the settings and then start to scroll down. Don’t go too fast or you’ll miss it, but start looking for three options in here. They’ll be together, so once you see one of them the other two are going to be right next to it. Look for the options with the titles Window Animation Scale, Transition Animation Scale, Animator Duration Scale and then tap on the first one. Just like you see in the image above, you’ll be greeted with multiple options to choose from.

Now, if you want to disable the animations altogether, then all you have to do is tap on the Animations Off option here. But remember, this is just one of the three options that govern the animation speeds for Android. You’ll need to tap on the other two options and also set those to Animation Off as well. If you don’t want to disable the animations entirely, but instead just want to speed them up, then you should tap on the Animation Scale .5x option. And again, go through all three of these options that control Android’s animation speeds and set all of those to .5x. What this option does is it will make the animations feel twice as fast as they normally do.

Lastly, if you want to make the animations take longer(maybe you enjoy the animations and want to enjoy them when they happen), then you can increase these options to 1.5, 2x, 5x or even 10x. I don’t recommend the 5x or 10x options, but the others can be nice if you really enjoy the animations and want them to be slower. It’s all a personal preference and I’m very thankful that Google has these options within the Android code that allows us to adjust them(even if they are hidden away). I should also note that these particular options could be different depending on which version of Android you are running. For instance, I’m running the Pure Nexus Experience custom ROM on my Nexus 6P, and instead of the specific options like this, I’m given a sliding scale.

Some custom ROMs will even let the user select a .25x and .75x, to give them even more control over the animations. These values are just hardcoded into the Android OS and custom ROM developers are able to tweak them for the user if they feel it is wanted by the community. If you change these values, and don’t like the result, all you have to do is go back into the settings and change them back to 1x. 1x is the default and putting these values back to this default setting will bring you back to the exact same animation speed as before you started tweaking them.