How to speed up your Android phone or tablet

How To
By Contributions from last updated

Here’s how to speed up your Android phone or tablet quickly and easily

Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra
(Image credit: Future)

It’s useful to know how to speed up your Android phone or tablet. After all, even the best phones can get slow or laggy sometimes and need a bit of a spruce up. 

What’s more, with the tough financial times many of us find ourselves in these days, it’s reasonable for people to want to hold on to their tech a little longer than they otherwise usually would; pushing that upgrade back another year or so. In those circumstances, you’ll likely want to keep your older tech running as smoothly and quickly as it can. Part of that is learning how to speed up your Android phone or tablet that might be suffering a little under the weight of recent updates. 

All you have to do is read on and we’ll show you how to instantly speed up your Android phone or tablet.

 How to speed up your Android phone or tablet

1. Open Settings and tap About phone. 

(Image credit: Google)

 2. Tap Software information.

(Image credit: Google)

3. Tap Build number seven times and enter your PIN, password, or pattern, when prompted.

(Image credit: Google)

4. Go back to the main Settings menu and scroll to the bottom. Tap Developer options, which will now be listed.

Note: On a Google Pixel, the Developer options menu will be on the System page. Here's a full guide on how to enable Android Developer options.

(Image credit: Google)

5. Tap Window animation scale.

(Image credit: Google)

6. In the next box, select Animation scale .5x.

(Image credit: Google)

7. Select Transition animation scale .5x.

(Image credit: Google)

8. Select Animator duration scale .5x.

(Image credit: Google)

And with that, you're done! You’ll now notice that switching between apps and opening/closing menus is lightning fast. 

If you want to revert back to your previous settings, simply tap Developer options then toggle off developer mode to restore your previous settings. 

(Image credit: Google)

Note: As the developer menu contains a lot of advanced settings that could potentially cause issues with your device, we don’t recommend making changes to any other options in there. If you do accidentally change anything you're unsure of, switching off developer mode by following the step above should undo any changes and revert your device to its previous state.

Looking for more tutorials to help keep your Android device in great shape? Learn how to check Android battery health so you can keep on top of your phone's battery degradation. Going to bite the bullet and get a new Android phone anyway? Learn how to transfer data from Android to Android so you can move everything to your new device safely. If you want to send an iPhone user something, learn how to share files between Android and iPhone. Fancy sharing your musical exploits with the world? Discover how to upload music to Spotify.

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Dale Fox
Dale Fox
Freelance Journalist

Dale Fox is a freelance journalist based in the UK. He's been a tech nerd ever since childhood, when he used the money from his first job as a paperboy to buy a subscription to GamesMaster magazine. Dale was previously a presenter and editor in China, where he also worked as a copywriter for OnePlus at its Shenzhen HQ.  

With contributions from