12 Most Tweakable Developer Options on Android

You can customize and tweak almost every aspect of your Android phone by digging into its basic settings. However, if you want more control, you'll need to access the Developers tools menu. Unlocking the hidden menu is easy, but which Developer options are worth tweaking? Find out in this article!

1. Enable wired and wireless USB Debugging

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If you are a developer or someone who likes to tinker with Android, enabling USB Debugging is the first option you need to enable in the Developer options. This flag gives you high-level access to your device, which is useful for debugging and troubleshooting purposes.

With USB Debugging enabled, you can use ADB (Android Debug Bridge) to run advanced commands to pull cat logs, sideload external APKs, etc.

On older versions of Android, you could only debug over a USB connection. However, newer releases also support wireless debugging, allowing you to run ADB commands wirelessly over Wi-Fi.

2. Adjust animation speed

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Depending on the speed of your phone, you may not notice it, but Android plays animations when opening or switching between apps. You can adjust the length of these transitions using the Window animation scale , Transition animation scale  , and Animator duration scale settings .

Try setting these values ​​to 0.5x the normal speed (lower values ​​are faster, higher values ​​are slower) if you want your Android device to feel a little faster.

However, depending on the speed of your device, these animations can hide some hidden loading times when switching between apps, so it's best to change them back to normal if your phone feels slow after speeding up.

3. Display refresh rate

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The best Android phones have high refresh rate displays. They can also dynamically adjust the refresh rate depending on the content you're viewing to save battery and provide a better viewing experience.

As a developer or tinkerer, you might want to know the refresh rate of your phone screen when streaming content or running certain apps.

The Show refresh rate toggle in the Input section will show the current refresh rate of the display in the upper left corner.

You can also turn on the Force peak refresh rate toggle  for extra smoothness, although it may impact battery life. This will force your phone to use the highest possible refresh rate for smoother touch interactions.

4. Force the app to resize

Android supports multi-window multitasking, allowing you to run two apps in split-screen mode. However, developers may not always allow their apps to be resized, preventing you from using them in multi-window mode.

Luckily, you can work around this limitation by enabling the Force activities to be a resizable option in Developer settings. Turning on this toggle will allow you to resize the windows of any app installed on your phone. This is especially useful if you have a foldable phone from Samsung or OnePlus, as they allow you to run apps in windowed mode.

5. Turn off mobile data always active

Many Android phones always keep mobile data active, even when the phone is connected to Wi-Fi. This ensures a quick and seamless transition between mobile data and Wi-Fi with minimal downtime.

However, in some cases this can increase battery consumption. Additionally, if your phone is almost always connected to Wi-Fi, there is no need to enable mobile data in the background.

To avoid this, turn off the Mobile data always active setting from the Developer Options menu. However, if you use Wi-Fi Calling, you should leave this option enabled. Otherwise, calls will be dropped if you switch network types.

6. Change display density

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Android allows you to adjust the font size and screen resolution. However, these adjustments have limited effect and will not significantly increase the information density of the screen. This can be frustrating, as some Android phones have uncomfortably poor information density despite having large, high-resolution screens.

Setting Smallest width in Developer options helps overcome this limitation. This is usually the first option to try on a new Android device after enabling the hidden Developer Options menu.

Entering a higher number in the Smallest width box will increase information density, which means reducing the size of the content displayed on the screen to fit more information. Similarly, entering a lower number will decrease information density, making everything larger and easier to touch.

7. Show touches

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Having intermittent touchscreen issues on your Android phone? They can be difficult to diagnose. However, a hidden flag in the Developer options can make things easier.

Enable Show taps from the Input section of Developer Options. Then, whenever you tap on the screen, a dot will appear corresponding to the tapped area.

In addition to troubleshooting, this feature can also be a useful accessibility feature for people with mobility issues. Having these circles is also useful for creating screen recordings from your phone, such as tutorials. They allow viewers to see exactly where you're tapping.

For more touch data, try turning on Pointer location . This will display lines on the screen indicating where you've touched, along with data about your touches at the top of the screen. This can be useful if you're testing to see why part of your Android screen isn't working.

8. Turn off screen sharing protection

You can use the screen sharing feature in WhatsApp on your Android phone to provide remote technical support to your parents or friends. However, in some apps, such as banking and payment apps, screen sharing doesn't work. To work around this limitation, enable the Disable screen share protections button from the Developer options.

This will 'disable system protection for sensitive app content for future screen sharing sessions.' Be careful, though, as this can also leave your banking and payment apps vulnerable to screen recording malware. So it's best to only disable this feature when you need to share your screen to an app that has screen sharing protection.

9. Show Bluetooth device without name

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Sometimes, your Android phone may not detect the Bluetooth device you are trying to pair with. While there are many reasons behind this, in some cases, the problem may be caused by the Bluetooth device not being named. By default, Android does not show devices without names.

You can fix this issue by turning on the Show Bluetooth devices without names toggle from the Developer options. Your phone will then display the MAC addresses of Bluetooth devices without names. This is useful if you frequently use many different Bluetooth devices.

10. Default USB configuration

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By default, when you connect your Android phone to your PC, it will just charge and do nothing else. To transfer data, you have to manually select the File transfer mode. Likewise, if you frequently use your Pixel phone as a webcam with your PC, you'll need to select the appropriate mode whenever you connect the two devices.

Luckily, setting the Default USB configuration in Developer options can fix this problem. Go to settings and select the default USB mode. Depending on your device, you may have a number of options to choose from, including USB tethering, MIDI, PTP, Android Auto, and more.

Please note that this setting will only work when you connect your unlocked Android phone to another trusted device.

11. Absolute volume mute

By default, absolute Bluetooth volume is enabled on Android, which means that the volume buttons on your phone and the Bluetooth device both control the same volume level. This is usually convenient, but can cause problems with some Bluetooth devices.

Enabling the Disable Absolute Volume option means that your phone's volume and your Bluetooth device's volume will use two separate volume levels. Try this if your Bluetooth device's volume isn't working properly with your phone or is extremely loud or quiet.

With absolute volume off, you can set the volume of your Bluetooth device to an acceptable level and then use the volume buttons on your phone to make precise adjustments.

For absolute volume changes to take effect, you may need to disconnect and reconnect any Bluetooth devices or even restart your phone.

12. Turn on Don't Keep Activities

If you're a developer, you might find the Don't Keep Activities setting in Developer options useful. When enabled, Android kills all of an app's processes as soon as you exit the app. You can use this option to test how an app behaves in different scenarios.

Don't enable this option to free up more RAM on your phone. Regularly killing background processes actually does more harm than good on modern Android phones.

There are a lot of other settings in the Developer Options menu, but unless you're a developer or like to tinker with OS settings, you won't find them useful. Still, it's nice that Google is providing these tools to developers, who otherwise would have to jump through a lot of hoops to recreate certain conditions.

Lesley Montoya

Update 26 January 2025