I sped up my ancient Android phone with this one simple trick

Has your Android phone’s performance started to slip? If so, you’re far from alone; in the smartphone world, slick snappiness often gives way to laggy lethargy given enough time, often due to an influx of cache files, unoptimized software updates, a lack of available storage space, among several other factors.

Solutions to the problem of performance degradation are aplenty, and I’ve chronicled a set of tips and tricks to optimize efficiency in a separate article here on Pocket-lint. Out of all the available options, one stands out above the rest to me for its effectiveness and its ubiquity. It’s an oldie but a goodie: adjusting animation speeds within Android’s Developer options menu.

To be clear, adjusting your Android’s global transition scaling won’t actually speed up the device from a computational performance standpoint. Rather, animations will simply feel quicker, offering the illusion of a snappier gadget during day-to-day use. It’s not a perfect solution, but if you’re tired of choppy, drawn-out animations on your aging Android, it certainly suffices as a free and easily accessible option.

How to adjust global transition speeds on Android

The process is nearly identical across most Android-based smartphones and tablets

To adjust global transition speeds on Android, you first need to enable developer options within Settings. To do so, follow these steps:

1. Launch Settings.
2. Navigate to About phone > Build number.
3. Tap on the Build number seven times in a row.
4. Enter your PIN or password.

Once complete, a new Developer options submenu will appear within Settings > System, or, subject to software variation, it might appear directly on the main Settings page. Next, you’ll want to follow these steps to adjust animation speed parameters:

1. Launch Settings.
2. Navigate to System > Developer options > Drawing.
3. Tap on the following three settings and switch each of their respective transition animation scales from 1x over to .5x.

• Window animation scale
• Transition animation scale
• Animator duration scale

If you ever want to revert to your phone’s out-of-box animation speeds, simply return to Settings > System > Developer Options > Drawing and switch animation scales back to 1x. You can also disable Developer options altogether, by simply toggling the switch within its subpage to the off position.