Google has done a lot of work to Quick Settings tiles since Android 5.0 and in 5.1.x, you can hide a dynamic tile and remove it from Quick Settings.
In Android 5.0 Lollipop, we saw Google completely redesign the Quick Settings panel. Previously, Quick Settings was just a large grid of tiles with hardly any design elements to make it look good. Then in Android 5.0 this was changed into what we have today. The new Quick Settings is cleaner, it looks nicer, and it has more functionality than it did before. Dynamic tiles were in KitKat’s Quick Settings panel, so that’s not anything new, and they were in 5.0 Lollipop as well.
Google didn’t stop working on the Quick Settings panel after its initial redesign either. Android 5.1 saw the addition of a new feature that let you hide a dynamic tile from the Quick Settings panel.
If you aren’t familiar with what a dynamic tile is, then let me explain. When you use certain features of Android, there can sometimes be a new tile created for that feature. For example, there’s a dynamic tile for Chromecast, there’s one for a hotspot, there’s one for color inversion and a few others too. These are features that not everyone uses, and even those of us who do use them, we might not use them all the time. Android calls these dynamic tiles because if you don’t use the tile for X number of days then it goes away until you use it again.
Manually hiding these dynamic tiles wasn’t possible in Android 5.0, and it’s not possible in Android 6.0 either. It’s strange that Google added this feature for only a short period of time, but I kind of understand why. This was a pretty useful feature in the way Quick Settings were implemented with 5.0 and that’s probably why they added it for 5.1. However, in Android 6.0, Google added a new feature to Android that will let you manually add or remove tiles in the Quick Settings panel. So maybe Google feels that if you have the ability to manually add/remove tiles in Marshmallow then you don’t need to hide a panel you don’t want to see.
How to Hide a Dynamic Tile in Android 5.1
It’s really easy to hide a dynamic tile. When you see one appear(whether you manually triggered the feature or not), all you have to do is tap and hold down on that file. Eventually you’ll see a dialog box pop up asking if you want to hide this tile or if you want to cancel the action. If you look up at the image at the very top of this post then you’ll see what the dialog box looks like. It gets triggered from tapping and holding on a dynamic tile and it will only work on these dynamic tiles too. You won’t be able to hide the WiFi, Data or any other static tiles in the Quick Settings panel in this way.
I tried this in Android 6.0 by manually adding the hotspot tile via the system tuner. When trying to hide it, nothing happened. I also tried to replicate this feature on a device that is still running Android 5.0 Lollipop and again, nothing happened. So it seems like this will only work in Android 5.1 and that Google either wasn’t happy with how it was implemented, or felt the System Tuner was a better solution. Either way, if you’re rocking Android 5.1 and you are annoyed by a dynamic tile that keeps popping up in your Quick Settings panel then try this out and see if it works for you.
