Android Tips and Tricks
With android phones, there is a lot of customization you can do that can drastically improve your user experience!! Below I will highlight some of the ones that I find very useful on a daily basis.
RCS Messaging (Alternative to iMessage)
Universal to Samsung and Google phones, RCS enables better group chat support, reactions, higher quality image/video uploads, and end-to-end encrypted messages for one-to-one chatting.
Nearby Share (Airdrop for Android)
Works with Android 6.0 and up devices and with most recent Samsung and google phones. Nearby share allows users to share photos and videos with people nearby. Works the same way as airdrop but for Android.
Animation Speed
Did you know that you can change your animation speed on your android phone with just a few simple steps? In order to do so just access the developer options by going to about phone, -> build number tap couple of times -> system -> developer options -> animation speed.
Mic & Camera Access
With Android 12 :D you can manually enable or disable your mic and camera access — great for security control!
Swipe Typing
Instead of traditional on-screen typing, swiping allows you to interact with the keyboard in a different way and might be better for one-handed purposes.
Battery Saving Modes
Most android phones have some sort of battery-saving feature on pixel phones there is a regular battery saver and an extreme battery saver mode.
Do Not Disturb mode
This mode disables all notifications only leaving alarms on (great for classroom and sleeping environment).
Customizing Quick Settings
On all Android phones, there is a way to rearrange and remove quick settings from your notification panel. Usually, there is an edit button and from there you can rearrange the quick settings tiles to your heart’s content.
Google Photos
Some android phones will have their own gallery app but if you are using Google Photos (the default gallery app for all Google phones), there are extensive photo editing tools built into the app. You can change anything from the contrast to highlights to brightness to shadows to changing color temperature with the tools. And for videos, you can even add in extra stabilization to make your videos look extra smooth.
Sideload Apps
Proceed with caution. The great thing about android is its open-source nature allowing people to sideload apps that they wouldn’t normally find in the normal app store. A sideloaded app that I regularly use is Tubemate which allows people to download youtube videos as an mp3 file or video format for offline listening and viewing.
Launchers, Custom Icons, and Widgets
Another great thing about android is its customization opportunities; if for any reason you don’t like the layout of your android phone’s home screen or app drawer you can switch to another launcher to change it completely. While IOS 15 now has widgets and different icon options it is still fairly limited. With Android, there are more extensive widget options. For Custom Icons instead of having to create an extra shortcut to change the look of the icons on android is as simple as downloading an icon pack from the play store and applying it to your favorite launcher of choice.
