Android Digger #1 : Tips Every Android User Should Know.
Android is a powerful OS so full of features that you might miss some, this guide aims to help you understand better Android as an “average user” without going into too technical details.
NOTE : This guide was written with Android 6.0 (stock/nexus devices) in mind, some of the tips or features you see here might not work on older/skinned Android versions.
SUMMARY:
PART 1: General Tips + Hidden/Less Known Features.
PART 2: Useful Tweaks [With/Without Root Access].
PART 3: Battery Life Optimization Guide.
PART 4: ADB & Fastboot Essentials + Soft Brick Rescue Kit.
PART 5: General Advices For A Better Android Experience.
PART 1 : General Tips & Tricks + Hidden/Less Known Features:
The Lockscreen:
1- Voice Search Shortcut
2- Lock state, icon changes depending on the lockscreen modes( Locked, Unlocked, Fngprnt., Face Dtc. etc ). If you are using Face Detection and the phone unlocks itself, you can hit the icon to lock it.
3- Default Camera app shortcut
4-Carrier
5- Status icons and profile
/6- Time,Date,Alarm,Name.
7- Notification zone, here will be shown your notifications, swipe down to expand each notification / show more notifications.
Slightly pull down a notification to only expand it ( keep holding )
Placing an icon on top of another creates a folder.
Not only you can use the search bar on the top to look for things on the internet, you can also look for content on your phone like Contacts, songs, apps. ( Feature needs to be enabled in Google Search app’s settings )
Long pressing the drawer icon takes your directly to the app searching screen.
Say OK Google to trigger a voice search action ( Feature needs to be enabled in Google search app’s settings)
Swipe from the left to access Google Now.
Using the scroll bar you can get an alphabet indicator.
Use the search apps bar to quickly find what you are looking for if you’re the “what’s uninstalling ?” guy.
You can enable app suggestions on Google search app’s settings to see your must apps on the first row.
You can swipe down from the status bar to see your notification.
Swipe down once again to get to the quick toggles panel.
Swipe down from the status bar with two fingers to quickly access the quick toggles panel.
Long press a notification to see from what app it’s coming from, tweak the notification setting ( if the app uses this API)
Tap on the “text” where the arrow is on the two first toggles ( Wi-Fi / Bluetooth ) to directly see what Wi-Fi networks/Bluetooth devices are beaming around.
Some toggles like Do not disturb and Carrier does have an expanded view where you can do some more settings without leaving the quick toggles panel.
Pressing the round profile icon on the top right corner shows your profiles.
Long press the settings shortcut to enable SystemUI Tuner.
Quick Settings : From here you can re-order your toggles or you can add more with a new broadcast feature and compatible apps like this one .
Status bar: allows you to pick which icon should/shouldn’t be shown in the status ( battery, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Casting etc )
Sebp: you guessed it.
Demo Mode: this a mode for developers to take clean status bar screenshots for the google play store screenshots ( it’s written in the guidelines that the status bar should be clean. IT HAS TO BE CLEAN. GUIDELINES SAID SO.)
Long press the settings gear shortcut again to remove it.
Go to Settings/About phone and hit the Build number line multiple times quickly to enable Developer Options.
Go To Settings/ Developer Options, scroll down to Windows Animation scale, Transition animation scale, animator duration scale and set everything to 0.5x to go even faster ( Tssshhhvv style)
Plug your device to your computer via USB, pull down the notification shade and hit “USB for XXX” notification, from here you can choose what to do with your connector, dope huh ?
If you got a device with USB-Type C you can do even more, for example if you have a Nexus 6P and your phone a 5X you can charge his phone with yours and vice versa.
You can your default USB Configuration mode by going into the previously enabled Developer Options/Select USB Configuration.
You can use your connector for :
Charging, MTP, PTP, RNDIS, Audio Source, MIDI…
Go to Settings/Apps and hit the setting gear icon on the top right side
App permissions allows your to manage permissions of every single app, but warning some apps are not built for this new feature and disabling some permissions can break the app.
App links allows you to manage the “Open by default” settings for example you can set choose to open or not the YouTube app everytime you open a url starting with youtube.com
Default apps allows you to pick your favorite Browser, Phone, SMS and Assit & Voice Input app.
Battery optimization allows you to set what app should be affected by DOZE.
for the rest, you guessed it.
Go to Settings/Developer Options/Running Services to see what apps are running and how much ram they are taking.
On previous Android version ( before M) this setting is under Settings/Apps/Running Tab
You can click on a desired app and hit Force close to terminate it, note that if you do that to apps like Whatsapp or Telegram you won’t receive any notification until you restart the app manually.
Go to Settings/Sound & Notification/Other Sounds to enable or disable some sounds like the dial pad tones, screen locking sounds etc
Go to Settings/App notifications to set what app can/can’t show notification and set prioritary ones plus allow peeking.
Go to Settings/Sound & Notifications/Do not disturb/ to create a do not distrub profile with automatic rules.
Go to Settings/Sound & notifications/When device is locked to show or hide notification on the zone 7 of the lockscreen.
Long press the power button, long press the Power Off option to get to SAFE MODE
Safe Mode boots the system without 3rd party apps ( useful in case you installed a junky app that made your phone got nuts)
You can also boot into Safe Mode by long pressing the Volume Up button when the phone is booting up.
To disable safe mode, simply reboot normally.
Go to Google Dialer/Menu(3Dots)/ from here you can enable or disable Google’s caller ID + Nearby Places
Google’s Caller ID shows you names of numbers you don’t have in your contacts.
Nearby Places shows you nearby places about what you are searching for in the dialer app.
In the Favorites view of the dialer, pressing the contact in favorites calls him directly, long pressing it allows you to reorder them, tapping the three dot menu button expands the contact card to show more details
Go to your favorite SMS app, in this case it’s Google Messenger, hit the three dot menu button go to settings then Advanced and enable SMS Delivery reports.
Now when you send an SMS you will see a checkmark ( similar to what you get on Telegram or Whatsapp) when your sms is delivered to the receiver.
Unfortunately it doesn’t tell you if it was read or not, it’s just when it’s has been delivered.
When you set an alarm, you can quickly access it from the quick toggles panel you will see it right next to the date on the upper left corner.
Long pressing the clock takes you directly to the Night Mode ( Similar to Daydream ).
Now when you set an alarm on the phone, it automatically takes it to your Android Wear devices so you get a pretty violent wakeup to put your a good morning mood :cough:
Hit one of the volume buttons to see the volume bar, from here you can adjust the volume, hit the bell icon to directly set the phone to vibrate mode or hit the arrow to get more audio control for alarms and media sounds.
When on vibrate mode, hitting the volume down button enables Do Not Disturb mode.
Speakings about buttons, you can press all your buttons (power + volume up + volume down) at once to make a bug report, your device will vibrate once and it will vibrate again when the report is done ( you get a notification so you can send it to your grandfathers, i’m sure they’ll know what to do ).
Android Lollipop introduced an awesome new API called Camera 2 API, this API allows you to control manually every setting of your camera, exposure, focus, iso, shutter speed etc in Photo mode & Video too, of course you need compatible apps like Manual Camera or L CAMERA
Google Voice Search can perfom some useful tasks even when you are offline.
Just Say OK Google(in enabled or hit the mic button ) Wake me up a 7AM, or Wake me up in two hours etc ( you have to try it there is a lot of combos) you can also say “ Send a whatsapp message to John Lennon, tell him mint stuff buddy “
You can also set reminders with advanced settings “ Ok Google, remind me to buy a fancy shirt when i’m at DuarteShop “
I can’t live without this features, it’s just so handy Oh and when you have OK Google enabled, once your phone is charging it’s always listening so you can trigger whatever you want without touching anything.
NOW ON TAP : Oh yeah my favorite Android 6 feature, when enabled now on tap can be triggered by long pressing the home button, it looks for everything that is displayed and shows a list of informations, could be a brand, place, people whatever … it’s just brilliant !
For example if you have a conversation where your friend is giving you rendez-vous, if you Now On Tap It it automatically shows you an option to create a calendar event ( auto filled with informations gathered from the conversation ).
You can customize the default apps for Google Search voice commands:
When you trigger an action for example “OK Google, Take a picture” the Google Search app will automatically launch the Google Camera app.
To change that, simply go back, hit the three dots menu button, select your favorite camera app and hit the check mark.
The next time you repeat this command your favorite app will launch.
You can of course set the default camera app on your phone but this allows you to, in my case keep the Google Camera app as my default one and get Manual Camera when I trigger it by voice.
You can change a lot of things too ( like your default browser etc ).
Lollipop & Marshmallow got a new feature called Tap & Go. I never tried it but i heard it works great here is a demo
PART 2: Useful Tweaks [ROOT].
Alright now let’s go a little bit deeper, i said before without going into “too technical” details but these are pretty simple and easy to understand.
I’m not going into ROMs and Kernels, these are some simple tweaks you can do with a file explorer and a text editor.
The build.prop magic: You can apply some nice tweaks to your phone just by editing the build.prop file located in /System/build.prop/ you can open it with a simple text editor, one of the best tweaks you can do here is editing the screen density of your phone. Ever felt like stuff are too big on your screen ? feeling that your big sharp screen isn’t exploited as it should ? Yeah me too, that’s why i changed the density of my device to make things smaller and display more content in a single screen to do so, locate the line ro.sf.lcd_density=XXX and change the XXX value to whatever suits you best ( lower = smaller ), just don’t go too far you will have to play with it a little bit for example my Nexus 5 was set by default to 480dpi. I find that to be way too big for that screen so i made things smaller and went with 420dpi. You can google around some tweaks for the build.prop there are tons of things you can do with it.
Got a Touchwiz/Sense/Whatever skin on your device ? Tired of all these S-Potatogun useless bloatware on your phone that you can’t uninstall ? you can get rid of all these with Root access and a file manager like Root Browser. Simply navigate to /System/App/ or /System/Priv-app/ and delete everything you don’t like, just make sure not to touch some important apps like SystemUI, Settings, Connectivity related things. For example on a Samsung device you can safely remove the Samsung Apps, Memo and in general S-Stuff safely. If you are not rooted you can disable some of them but you won’t get the same result as deleting them.
You live in a country where Google Now is not available ? You can enable it by faking your location, you can follow this easy tutorial to do so How To Enable Google Now In non-supported countries.
PART 3: Battery Life Optimization Guide.
NOTE: Results depends on your usage, apps installed, networks and others factors.
I used to find myself always worried about my battery, no matter what device i was using i was always checking that little battery percentage on the top, limiting myself to some apps and underclocking my processor and stuff like that i realized i wasn’t actually enjoying it i was frustrated by that. Now i found a way to no give a nut about it and get a perfect balance between performance/efficiency and battery life.
NOTE2: Do not expect miracles, you can’t just super extend your battery life by switching two toggles, there is a limit, if a battery is small, it’s small you can’t change that but this guide will help you get the maximum out of it.
First things first, the Mobile Network a lot of people i know leave their mobile data active all the time, even if they don’t need it, they also set their phones to 4G/3G mode all the time and that guys may impact your battery life a lot especially in standby. Make sure to disable mobile data when you don’t need it, also put your phone in 2G Mode when you are not going to use any data as it’s more battery friendly than 3G/4G plus generally 2G signal is always stronger than the others as it’s common so your phone won’t struggle with signal. When you are in an area with no signal at all, better put your phone in airplane mode so that it won’t keep looking for a slice of network and eating a lot of battery.
Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and NFC Make sure to disable these when you are not using them, do not let the Wi-Fi on when you are outside, your phone will just keep looking for networks around and consuming energy for nothing. Same thing goes for bluetooth and NFC.
GPS also is huge battery killer, try to set your phone location settings to Battery Saving mode so that the Wi-Fi/Mobile network data will be used to locate you instead of the GPS chip when you are not using features like Navigation (You don’t need High-Accuracy mode for an Instagram selfie huh ?). If you don’t need location at all just disable it. If you are on M, go to /Settings/Location/Three dots menu button/Scanning/ and disable the Wi-Fi + Bluetooth scanning feature that will save you a lot of juice. ( On Lollipop the Wi-Fi scanning toggle is under /Settings/Wi-Fi/Advanced).
SYNC Some of you may not even know about this one, disable Android’s auto sync setting if you are not using it, If you need to be notified when your emails are here etc then it’s okay keep it, but if you are not into the business game and you don’t need to be notified instantly just disable it this will save you a lot of battery as your phone won’t refresh every app every couple of minutes. When you need to check your mails, just open the app, need to know if someone liked your high-accuracy gps tagged selfie ? Just open the app. It might take you one or two taps more but it saves you a bunch of juice.
Oh and do not worry about apps like Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, Telegram, Twitter etc most of these use their own notification service that is independt from the Android sync setting so you will still get notifications for these on time.
The Screen the main battery eater is your screen, i prefer setting the brightness myself so that i get a good viewing without going too far like the auto setting does. I’m not going to talk about the screen dimming time, do whatever suits you the best, when i want to turn it off, i just turn it off. And no setting your screen time to 10minutes won’t be applied on the lockscreen so if you wake your device in your pocket it won’t be on for 10 minutes it will turn back off after a couple seconds.
Apps There isn’t much you can do here, just make sure to pick the right apps, avoid ones that have a ton of background services that throws ads in your notifications and keeps running all the time you know these apps…. With Android M you can disable some permissions, if you don’t want X app to use location and drain your battery just remove the location access permission to it ( Note that i might break one or two features of the app if these requires a gps location, Captain Obvious always here to serve.)
If an app is popular it doesn’t mean it’s well optimized, some apps like Facebook, Snapchat etc are huge battery eaters. I don’t even want to go in the details of the Facebook app, this thing has to be redone from scratch. If for example the Twitter app is eating a lot of battery, look for 3rd party twitter apps these might be more optimised. Keep an eye on what’s eating your battery by going into /Settings/Battery
Enable Battery Saving mode when you won’t be using your phone a lot, the battery saving mode introduced with Lollipop is super agressive and might save your life in case you need that 911 1% call.
DOZE introduced with M does a fantastic job when your device is idle by reducing app’s sync times and wakeups.
Stop the battery 0% calibration myth. You don’t have to fully discharge your device and no there is no longer what’s known as “Memory Effect” on our devices, technology buddy, it goes fast.
No fast charging technologies like Qualcomm Quick Charge won’t kill your battery. If your phone supports this features your phone won’t be harmed, the process is more complex and smart than what you think it is see here :
Close apps when you are not using them, easy huh ?
And finally do not, DO NOT DON’T NEVER NEVER NEVER use the magical “ AWSUM BATTERY LIFE SAVER PRO 3000- AN ERA OF BATTERY LIFE WITH A SINGLE CHARGE” apps. These “ battery optimized” doesn’t do anything but kill your battery, Android is known for keeping apps in memory, if you open X app for the first time it will take F seconds to load. When you close it Android keeps it in memory so that the next time you open the X app if will load in less than F seconds. Empty RAM on Android is useless RAM ( Of course i’m not saying that your RAM should be always full you need free ram so that your phone won’t slow down and have a hard time treating new processes ) These “ battery saving apps” keep killing your apps, and Android will reopen them and put them back in memory is you are going into an infinite loop and having to reopen apps everytime requires the processor to work hard, so your battery will work hard too. Just let Android do it’s stuff.
PART 4: ADB & Fastboot Essentials + Soft Brick Rescue Kit.
ADB & Fastboot are awesome easy to use tools that every Android user should learn.
Before using them go to /Settings/Developer Options/ and enable USB Debugging and plug your phone to your computer then say yes to the trust message that will pop up.
ADB: Once you have adb in your computer ( for this example i’m using a Windows CMD, commands might be a little be different on OSX …) you can set a variable for it in your Windows settings so that you can directly use it via CMD or you can open a CMD window and type: cd YOUR/ADBFOLDER/PATH/
Then you can use the commands that are written in this table here
Same thing goes for Fastboot here are some useful commands :
When flashing your Nexus, extract everything that is in your ROM zip and place them in a folder for example FlashThis in your desktop. CMD :
cd desktop
cd FlashThis
Then you can flash everything easily without having to type the path of the file
fastboot flash bootloader YOURBOOTLOADERFILENAME.img
fastboot reboot-bootloader ( obvious)
fastboot flash recovery YOURRECOVERYFILENAME.img
fastboot flash system YOURSYSTEMFILENAME.img
fastboot flash userdata YOURUSERDATAFILENAME.img
fastboot erase cache
fastboot flash boot YOURBOOTFILENAME.img
fastboot reboot ( reboots the phone )
- other useful commands :
fastboot boot YOURCUSTOMRECOVERY.img( this will boot your phone temporarly in a custom recovery of your choice so that next time you reboot you get back your stock recovery, pretty useful)
fastboot devices (if it shows you a OMGSOHACKER name it means your device is connected, if it shows a OMGBLANKSPACE it means your device is not connected/recognized by your computer )
Then there is an awesome little zip everyone who is rooted with a custom recovery who keeps messing around with system files should have, AROMA FILE MANAGER . Once you mess up your phone and it goes in a bootloop because of a forgotten file permission or whatever you messed up boot in your custom recovery, mount your /system/ partition and flash this zip, it will open a File Manager just like ones you use so that you can delete/copy/move/change permissions and correct your mistakes.
WUGFRESH Toolkit is also a must have if you want to automate everything about adb & fastboot. (I like to do it manually, feels great to be useful as i can’t open the peanut butter jar. )
PART 5: General Advices For A Better Android Experience.
Keep your phone and apps updated. Updates are great. They fix bugs and add new features. How cool is that ?
Copy stuff you don’t need to your computer to free some memory, full phones are bad.
Don’t worry about charging your phone, just juice it up whenever you want/can just don’t do it when it’s super hot, heat is bad for the battery.
If you are a heavy user, whatever phone you have it might get hot, sometimes super hot. Don’t worry even if it reaches 50°c ( I had phones that reached more, Hi Exynos 5 Toaster) it won’t burn. The phone automatically turns itself off to protect the components. It won’t turn back on until it cools down.
Don’t leave your phone where it can get hot, like super hot, the battery doesn’t play well with that.
A lot of people using OLED screens are worried about burnins. Burnins doesn’t happen magically. Just don’t keep your phone displaying a static image for a long time, i had a lot of OLED devices and i never experienced a burnin as i never kept my phone displaying a static image for a long time you should be good( in Android, the status bar and softkeys are often the cause of that ) Don’t use your phone as a GPS for a very long time ( 1/2 hours ) you don’t want to see that fabulous navigation FAB everywhere you go Garmin made something for you. Luckily Android’s immersive mode hides the softkeys and the satus bar when for example gaming or watching a video, some developers don’t take advantage of that API but you can trigger it by using some apps like this one GMD IMSV.
If your phone has a MicroSD card slot, make sure you are using a high speed card, when running apps from an SD Card you need high read/write speeds especially if it’s a game. Slow cards might cause your problems.
When your processor reaches a high temperature it automatically limits itself to reduce the heat, that’s why you might notice a loss in performance when your phone is hot.
Your charging brick doesn’t do all the job, your cable too is very important. If you are using some high speed charging brick ( QC 2.0 for example ) use high quality cables, when the cable is very long make sure it’s 24/28AWG to avoid a big loss you can calculate approximatively the output power with an app like AMPERE . Note that Quick Charge does not push the maximum all the time, it regulates it through various steps so don’t worry if you see that your “3A” power brick is not delivering all the juice.
That’s it guys, the mess is over. If you found this article useful feel free to share it, If you have more tips let me know via the comments section so that i can add them in the next episode. Thanks for reading, SHOA.
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