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Comment by kgwxd | Hacker News Reader

Just last week I discovered I could disable animations in Android through the hidden developer options. It's fabulous. The only initial quirk was no visual feedback when a picture is successfully taken, so it felt like i missed the button, but I've gotten used to it already.

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!!!!!

That is a amazing!!! I had no idea developer meant "interested user".

> Make sure developer options are enabled. If they're not, go to Settings > About phone, then tap on Build number several times to enable it

> Go to Settings > Developer options, and scroll down to Window animation scale, Transition animation scale, and Animator duration scale.

> Tap on each of the animation options and turn them off.

https://lifehacker.com/disable-animations-on-android-to-impr...

On my first try I accidentally tapped "Android version" instead of "Build number" :)

on 7.x, that leads to an easter egg.

8.0 too

:( I am still on Android 6.

I thought the Google Nexus 5 phone would be getting updates often...but I guess not.

If you you're comfortable with custom ROM, LineageOS[1][2] is very stable and snappy on Nexus 5.

[1] https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/hammerhead

[2] https://download.lineageos.org/hammerhead

This is the best thing I've learned all day.

There are also various visual feedback options, such as a CPU load indicator, or a debug renderer for screen touches which allows you to see if your touchscreen is misbehaving and how (happens to me when I plug my charger, for example).

Wow that makes an huge difference to usability. My phone feels like it's several times as fast now. Who knew that it felt slow and laggy on purpose!

It's really good!

> Just last week I discovered I could disable animations in Android through the hidden developer options. It's fabulous. The only initial quirk was no visual feedback when a picture is successfully taken, so it felt like i missed the button, but I've gotten used to it already.

Are you talking about this: https://www.cnet.com/how-to/speed-up-your-android-by-adjusti... ?

I set mine to "0.5", and everything's much snappier, but they still play so I still get some feedback.

You can also speed them up a bit. Makes the phone seem a lot snappier without breaking apps that seem to rely on animations for timing (I'm looking at you, messenger's "share" feature which doesn't have a send delay if you disable animations)

Another bonus is how much longer your battery lasts without animations. I'm pretty sure battery saver just turns off tactile response, and disables animations for the most part (in addition to changing the gps update speed if you are using location services)

Try setting just "Animator duration scale" to 0.5x while leaving the others off. This will fix the camera problem, as well as makes things like closing apps in the "recent" list less janky, and you still get the rest of the benefit.

It's a real pity that there isn't a .25x setting, or even a .125 setting; the .5x setting feels nice, but still a bit slow-ish. I understand that the intent here is to simulate slow phones (try using the phone with the 10x setting — it's horrid!), but it'd be nice to simulate a fast phone instead!

Even on the 0.5x setting things like the refresh pinwheel spin a little too fast, so 0.25x might be a bit much. It just controls too many different animations.

Does anyone know if you can do the same with iPhone?

Only if you jailbreak

Settings -> General -> Acessibility -> Reduce Motion

Oh nice, thanks! Unfortunately it seems that apps still animate.

Yeah and I still see a lag from opening apps.

If you have root you can write a MobileSubstrate hook that calls UIView setAnimationsEnabled:NO in a hooked constructor of UIView (then call super.)

Completely disabling animations would break many apps, because a lot is going on in completion blocks of animations. Setting animation durations to a very low value would work though (that’s also what you have to do for UI tests).

I've done this as well. It reminds me of when I upgraded PalmOS devices in Ye Olde Days and home would appear instantly when you tapped it.

There is a similar setting in Windows, in case anyone is interested.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\MenuShowDelay

Wow! Didn't know this existed, thanks for the tip!

This is simply amazing! Thanks for sharing!

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