Make your Android phone feel faster with this one neat trick

Currently, my phone is a Samsung Galaxy S22. I bought it in early 2023, just after the S23 was announced. Since phones don't change that much year-on-year, I didn't see the need to get the absolute latest, after my beloved Oneplus 7 Pro started showing its age and lost upstream Android support. Fast forward 2 years, and it's still doing fine, but it's not as snappy as it used to be. It's not slow per-se, it's just that everything takes that little bit longer than it used to.

I don't do much with my phone. Nothing remotely CPU intensive, nor intensive gaming or AI-enhanced trickery. I just want to navigate around, promptly, in peace.

So, when digging around through the settings like one day, as any technology enthusiast does (right?), I spotted something which made a huge difference to the performance of my phone - or at least how I perceived it: Animation speed.

#Animations

It's a general rule of thumb that 300ms is the maximum amount of time something should take before the user notices. It's a good rule of thumb when it comes to any kind of user interaction. If something takes less than 300ms, the user probably won't feel or notice it, nor get distracted.

Animations can help make slow loading times feel a little smoother. Let a pretty UI make up for something taking a little longer to load than you might want. But most people like them because they look prettier. Android has a lot of animations. Unlocking, closing and switching apps, even moving between different screens on the same app. Whilst apps can manage them themselves, the native UI components most use to build apps are controlled by system settings, along with the rest of the system animations.

If the animations are faster, they take less time, and I can do what I need to do faster. Sure, it doesn't look quite as pretty, but I'll take that for a fake performance boost.

#Changing settings

Changing the setting is pretty easy:

1. Become a developer (on your phone, at least)
2. Under Developer options, under the "Drawing" section, find "Window animation scale" (and other "animation scale" settings)
3. ???
4. Performance!

I set all mine to 0.5x, which halves the animation speed, and changes take effect immediately.

#Success?

In reality, my phone isn't really doing anything any faster. Apps still take the same amount of time to load and crazy AI-enhanced photos take just as long to process. However, my phone unlocks that little bit faster and apps feel like they open a little faster. All without needing to give yet more money to Google, Samsung, or anyone else for that matter.