Let’s talk about smartphones. They’ve changed our lives considerably since they first rolled/scrolled onto the tech scene a decade ago. The amount of people who have avoided coming into the possession of one pale in comparison to the number of those who carry one with them day in, day out, wherever they go. Their functionality is almost unparalleled, replacing everything from cameras to torches to TV remotes. However, there are several functions that your phone has that you don’t even know about. These go beyond the standard smartphone functions. They aren’t openly advertised by the OS, nor are they noticed by the average user. But that’s our job here. We want to turn you from a regular user into a power user.
Hidden deep within Android’s manifold options, there are obscured technologies and functions galore, while the Play Store allows you to expand them even more. Whether you use your phone for work, rest or play, this list will help you to discover new ways to use your phone. From transferring files with lightning speed to staying on the bleeding edge of Android (bleeding...silicon, I guess), or making your phone look exactly how you want it, we’ve got you. We can even help you sleep better, at least, theoretically.
Are there any hidden Android tricks that you’ve found that aren’t on this list? Got any feedback on the ones we’ve suggested? Let us know in the comments!
25 Get Faster Charging
The modern world produces many problems and emotions that it wasn't possible to experience before, and not all of these are positive. Picture the scenario: you’re getting ready to go out for the night or head to work, and you take a peek at your battery indicator, noticing, with a sinking stomach, that it’s near empty. Fast charging technologies exist, but sometimes even these aren’t fast enough. There is, however, a way to charge your phone even quicker. Throw your phone into airplane mode. That’s right, it’s not just to appease cabin staff anymore! By disabling mobile networks and wi-fi, your phone isn’t going to be receiving as many notifications or using the battery to fetch messages, allowing for much faster charging. Next time you’re going out for the night, throw your phone into Airplane Mode, charge it for a half hour and go!
24 Scanners Begone
Digitizing documents used to be a bit of a pain, didn’t it? You’d have to seek out a scanner and use the cumbersome desktop programs. It felt like it took ages, and you’d have to go back to the scanner to change each document individually. Android has a solution in app form. Go to the Play Store and grab Evernote. Its simple note-taking capabilities belie several deeper ones, including the ability to scan your documents using your phone camera. With the app open, all you need to do is hold your camera over a document so all of its corners are visible, and Evernote will snap a picture of it. Printed documents, as well as neatly handwritten ones (which eliminates this writer, but you can’t have it all,) are searchable.
23 Don't Wait For Your Android Updates!
Ever been in the situation I was in a couple of months back? You’ve got your phone and you’re happy with it, but you want the latest Android version, and you want it now. Whether it’s Nougat or Oreo that you want, you can get it, and you don’t have to wait until your phone manufacturer releases it. If you’re the quickdraw type, you can root your device and install the latest OS. You’ll want to backup your phone first, in case anything goes wrong. Find the rooting software for your model, hook your phone up to your PC, and start the rooting process, which will allow you to install the Android version of your choice! You can even downgrade to an older version this way, if the new one is giving you grief.
22 Turn Your Speaker Output From Tinny To Golden
With more and more phones boasting of large, loud speakers, it’s a surprise to find that many are still disappointingly tinny. Sure, if you want to listen to podcasts, it’s fine, but for music, it’s more than a little lackluster. That bass isn’t hitting as hard as you want, or the treble distorts into a tinny mess. That’s where equalizer apps come in. Equalizers allow you to change how your speaker outputs, changing the ratio of bass, mid, and treble. There’s several available on the Play Store, and they can really improve your speakers. Many come with built-in profiles for various types of music or other media, as well as letting you play around with virtual faders to your heart’s content. Live that record producer dream, and customize your listening experience to your ears.
21 Find Out Exactly What Is Draining Your Battery
A rapidly draining battery can provoke feelings ranging from irritation to straight-up terror. If you’re out and about and need that battery, you’ll need to flip on battery saver and cross your fingers, wondering whether you’ve got a virus or just a particularly power-hungry app. There is a solution though, and it’s built into Android! If you go to the battery screen in settings, you can see exactly what is draining your power, and a projection of how long you’ve got left until your phone battery meets its end. There’s also a built-in battery optimizer you can find under the menu on this screen. On many other devices, such as laptops, this would require dedicated apps, so it’s a nice one to see included by default.
20 Put Security Up To Eleven
Apple’s “Find My iPhone” app is a very cool idea indeed. If your phone gets lost, or stolen, you can use it to track it down, and get it back. Android now has an equivalent! Called Find Device, you can use it on your desktop either by searching for "find your device," or download the app on an available phone to find another. From within this app, you can make your phone ring, if you’ve lost your phone in another room, stopping you from traipsing from room to room desperately searching. If you’ve lost it or think it’s been stolen, you can locate it on Google Maps and lock your phone, making it display a message and a phone number someone who finds it can contact you on. You can also remotely erase it if you’ve been mugged or burgled.
19 Zoom In On Any Location
Do you have eyes like a bat? I ain’t judging, I do! It can be infuriating when you want to get a closer look at an app when you’ve not got your glasses on, or need to see a minute detail, but you can’t zoom. Well, you actually can enable this ability, if you need it. The OS includes a screen magnifier option, which can be found in Accessibility, under System in settings. Enable magnification gestures, and you can zoom in anywhere on the screen by tapping the screen three times. You can also pan with your fingers and zoom in and out by pinching the screen. This will allow you to zoom in anytime, anywhere, any app, making your life far easier when you’re not wearing your glasses or contacts.
18 Get A Site's Desktop Version
Mobile sites are great most of the time — they give you the essential information you need, and, often, full functionality. Thing is though, sometimes certain features are reserved only for the desktop version of the website. Away from a computer? You needn’t despair. You can also get access to the desktop version on your Android device. All you need to do is go to Chrome’s menu and hit “request desktop site.” You’ll then be taken to the full version of the site, hopefully, optimized to your screen and not a sprawling mess. Since it’s just a checkbox, going back to the normal view is as simple as repeating the process. Previously, getting the full version of the site required hitting a button on the site itself, and then deleting cookies to return to the mobile view, making this is a considerable improvement.
17 Keep Your Settings Safe
Backing up your files is second nature to a lot of desktop users. Whether they do it through Dropbox, Google Drive, or plain old-fashioned memory sticks, it’s obvious to people that they need to keep their files safe, in case anything should go wrong. Why, then, do so few people take advantage of the same tech for their phones? In settings, go to “Backup and Reset” and enable the service under “Back up my data.” This allows you to store everything from wi-fi passwords, your call history, and app data, like settings, to your Google account. This means that should you have to reset your phone, your old app data and passwords will be redownloaded by default. Your apps will be just how you like them, and you won’t have to keep asking your buddies for their wi-fi passwords.
16 Hidden Games
This entry isn’t to do with productivity, but it does showcase a real neat easter egg that’s hard-baked into Android Nougat. This easter egg involves catching cats, and if you want to catch some Android kitties, now you can. All you need to do is go to settings, then about phone, and hit the Android Version button until a stylized letter N appears. Tap it a few times, and then hold it, and a cat emoji will appear at the bottom of your screen. Now go to your quick settings by pulling down from the top of the screen twice, and hit the pencil button. You’ll see a button at the bottom called “‘???’ Android Easter Egg.” Drag it into your quick settings, and choose your bait. You’ll be notified when you’ve caught a feline friend, which you can then share with others.
15 Access A Powerful New Range Of Tools
While you should only really access developer mode if you know what you’re doing, if you do, you can gain a lot more granular control over your device. For example, do you want to disable bloatware, without having to go through each app and uninstalling it? You can do that. All you need to do is go to the “Build Number” button in About Phone, and tap it until you get the message “you are now a developer!” You’ll now find a Developer Options button in settings, which gives you fine control over various aspects of your phone’s behavior. You can include options in the power menu to reboot into recovery or bootloader mode, set your phone to never go to sleep while charging, enable debugging mode, and even set how aggressive your phone is at switching to data when wi-fi signals are low.
14 Lower Your Data Consumption And Get Faster Internet
Running out of data is, I know, literally the definition of a first world problem. It is, however, still a problem. Not being able to access Messenger, or Whatsapp, or your email, can be extraordinarily frustrating. The app Jumpnet is an interesting potential solution to this problem. It’s in invite-only beta at the minute, but it uses a range of techniques to reduce your data consumption. These include automatically connecting to free and open Wi-Fi networks, amongst other techs, such as combining wi-fi and data. This has several advantages. You reduce your data bill while out and about thanks to your connections to free Wi-Fi networks, and also get consistent speed thanks to crossing the streams of data and wi-fi. This both lowers your data consumption while also providing reliable speed when wi-fi is weak.
13 Have Your UI Your Way
While many people resort to launchers when they want to tweak their AI, if you’re happy with Google Now, but still want to make some changes, you may be in luck with Android’s built-in UI Tuner. It’s hidden away in settings, but you can unlock it by longpressing the settings gear in quick settings for 5-7 seconds. You’ll know you’ve pressed it for long enough when the gear starts spinning. You’ll then get a notification at the bottom of your screen which says “System UI Tuner has been added to settings.” A little wrench will also appear next to the gear, and you can then find the UI Tuner in settings, underneath the “Printing” button. From here you can tweak a number of settings, from showing a numeric display of battery percentage remaining in the icon, to showing seconds on the clock.
12 Get Your Digits On Digits Faster
The built-in keyboards on Android do a decent enough job of allowing precise input, but do you ever find yourself wishing you could input numbers without toggling to the numbers and symbols section of your keyboard? You can expand the default Android keyboard to display numbers above the keyboard, as it would be on a desktop PC, without too much trouble. Do this by longpressing the comma/emoji button to the left of the spacebar, and dragging your finger to the settings gear that will appear in the context menu. Hit “Gboard keyboard settings,” then preferences. From here you can flip the “number row” switch to show a persistent numbers bar above the keyboard. You can also change a number of other settings from here, including adding emojis to the symbols keyboard.
11 Get Voice Control Offline
So Google Assistant is doing her level best to put PAs out of business the world over, but there’s one hitch, isn’t there? That she’s only around while data is. Every time you head out into the sticks, she decides being paid in awful questions and comparisons to Siri aren't enough to make her stay (and who can blame her), and heads off into the electronic wilderness. You can, however, download the Assistant to make use of its phone-controlling power, wherever you are. Open the Google app, and hit settings. Once here, go to voice, then offline speech recognition, pick your language, and go! Now she’ll be able to help you use your phone wherever you are, making hands-free use easy for driving and other situations.
10 Take Video And Photos Simultaneously
Cameras were one of the first devices phones killed in their vicious gadget genocide, to the point where now, unless you’re a professional or hobbyist photographer, you probably don’t own a dedicated camera at all. Where would we be without the ability to share our stupider (or more genius) moments the world over? However, the ability to film and take photos were often thought of as being mutually exclusive, but they needn’t be!If you’re filming a video, but also want to get that GREAT shot you’ve just noticed, then don’t despair! You can indeed do both, it’s quite easy. While filming a video, all you have to do is, depending on model, either tap the screen, or hit the same button you normally would to take a pic! And voila, you’ve got that sick shot!
9 Reboot Into Android's Safe Mode
Safe mode is an old standby for anyone who’s done even a small amount of PC repair. Disabling all third-party applications, safe mode lets you get deep into a machine’s virtual guts and sort any problems being caused by your other programs. What most people don’t know, however, is that there is a safe mode in Android. All you need to do is hold down your power button to bring up the menu, and then longpress shutdown. You’ll get a warning telling you you’re about to reboot into safe mode, and that all other applications will be available again upon reboot. Acknowledge this, and go forth on your debugging journey! This is a great way to uninstall troublesome applications or troubleshoot any issues you’re having, and a valuable tool in any tech fan’s toolkit.
8 Encrypt Your Data
While most iPhones around the world are encrypted, only around 10 per cent of Android phones are. In a world where privacy concerns are so rife, it’s a weight off your mind to know that your data is protected. To encrypt your data on Android, all you need to do is go to settings, then security. Under “encryption” you’ll see the option to encrypt your phone. The process may take a while, and you’ll need to have at least 80 percent battery life to start the process. You’ll also need to set a passcode with which to open your phone, if you haven’t already. Combine this feature with the backup and ability to remotely wipe your phone, and you’ll never need to worry about sensitive files or personal data falling into the wrong hands again.
7 Transfer Files With Lightning Speed
Remember back in the old days, when if you wanted to send your friend this hot new ringtone you had, you had to link up via Bluetooth and painstakingly share it at a rate of about 10KB/s? While those days are long gone, many people think that for phones to send data to each other, they first need to be hooked up to an existing wi-fi network, but this isn’t the case either! Most phones come with the feature Wi-Fi Direct, which allows two phones to connect to each other across a wireless network without first connecting to a router, with data transfer rates reaching up to 250Mb/s. To pair phones on your Android device, go to settings, wi-fi, then hit the three dots in the top right and go to the advanced menu. From here, you can go to the Wi-Fi Direct menu and start pairing devices!
6 See Notifications You Missed
Ever swiped a notification away then had a moment of brief panic, thinking: “dammit, I wanted to read that!” Never fear, there’s a way to look at swiped/read notifications, and it’s real easy! The Notification Log is a widget, a home screen customization option which many people, myself included, barely use. To get at it, you just need to longpress your homescreen, then select widgets. You’ll be presented with a list of apps which you can make widgets out of, but we’re interested in the settings option. Once you’ve scrolled down to S and hit the by-now familiar settings cog, you need to drag it to the homescreen. A menu will then load, letting you pick which aspect of settings you want to widgetize. Scroll down to notification log, and tap it. You’ve now got the notification log on your home screen, easily accessible by hitting the cog icon!