You can customize and tweak almost any aspect of your Android phone by diving into its basic settings. However, if you want to exert even greater control, you'll need to access the Developers tools menu. Unlocking the hidden menu is easy, but what Developer options are worth tweaking? Find out below.

1 How to Access Developer Options in Android

Before you can play around with the various settings in the Developer options, you must enable the menu itself. By default, the Developer options menu is hidden on all Android phones. Thankfully, enabling it is easy and the same across all Android devices.

1. Open the Settings menu on your phone. Scroll down and find the About phone section.
2. Depending on your phone, you might have to tap on Status to get to the page that shows the Build Number. Tap on it seven times to enable the hidden Developer settings. To confirm, you'll have to enter your phone's unlock pattern or password.

Once the menu is enabled, a toast notification will appear saying, "You are now a developer." Afterward, return to Settings > System to access the new Developer options menu entry.

If you can't find the option, use the search bar in the Settings menu to find Developer options.

The first time you access the menu, you must manually enable the Use developer options toggle and confirm your action in the dialog box that appears.

2 Enable Wired and Wireless USB Debugging

If you're an Android developer or tinkerer, enabling USB debugging is the first option you need to toggle in the Developer options. This flag provides you with 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 for pulling log cats, sideloading APKs, and more.

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

3 Tweak Animation Speed

Depending on how fast your phone is, you might not notice them, 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 to 0.5x the normal speed (lower values are faster, while higher values are slower) if you'd like to make your Android device feel a bit snappier.

However, depending on how speedy your device is, these animations might mask some hidden loading times when switching between apps. Thus, it might be best to change them back to normal if your phone seems clunky after speeding them up.

4 Show Refresh Rate

The best Android phones feature displays with high refresh rates. They can also dynamically adjust the refresh rate depending on the content you are viewing to save battery life and deliver a better viewing experience.

As a developer or tinkerer, you might be interested in knowing the refresh rate of your phone's display when streaming content or running certain apps.

The Show refresh rate toggle under the Input section in Developer options overlays your display's current refresh rate at the top left of the screen.

You can also enable the Force peak refresh rate toggle for extra smoothness, though it could affect battery life. This will force your phone to use the highest refresh rate possible for smoother touch interactions.

5 Force Activities to be Resizeable

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

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

6 Turn Off Mobile Data Always Active

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

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

To avoid this, disable 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 drop if you switch network types.

7 Change Display Density

Android allows you to tweak the font size and display resolution. However, these tweaks have limited effect and won't significantly increase the display's information density. This can be annoying, as some Android phones have frustratingly poor information density despite packing a big, high-resolution display.

The Smallest width setting in Developer options helps fix this limitation. It is typically the first option I play around with on a new Android device after enabling the hidden Developer options menu.

Entering a higher number in the Smallest width box will increase the information density, i.e., reduce the size of the content displayed on the screen to fit more information. Similarly, entering a lower number reduces the information density, making everything bigger and easier to tap.

8 Show Taps

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

Enable the Show taps toggle from the Input section of Developer Options. After this, whenever you touch the screen, a dot will appear corresponding to the touched area.

Apart from troubleshooting, the feature can also be a useful accessibility feature for people with motor problems. Having these circles is also useful for creating a screencast from your phone, such as a tutorial. They let viewers see exactly where you're touching.

For more touch data, try enabling Pointer location. This will show lines on the screen representing where you've touched, along with data about your inputs at the top of the display.

This could be useful if you're testing to check why a part of your Android screen is not working.

9 Disable Screen Share Protections

You can use screen sharing in WhatsApp on your Android phone to provide remote tech support to your parents or friends. However, in some apps, like banking and payment apps, screen sharing does not work. To work around this limitation, enable the Disable screen share protections toggle from the Developer options.

This will "turn off system protections for sensitive app content for upcoming screen share sessions." Be careful, though, as this can also leave your banking and payment apps susceptible to malware apps that try to record your screen. As such, it's best to only turn it off when you need to screen share an app that has screen share protections.

10 Show Bluetooth Devices Without Names

At times, your Android phone may fail to detect the Bluetooth device you’re trying to pair with. While there can be multiple reasons behind this, in some cases, the issue might occur because the Bluetooth device does not have a set name. By default, Android does not show devices without names.

You can work around this problem by enabling the Show Bluetooth devices without names toggle from the Developer options. After this, your phone will show the MAC addresses of Bluetooth devices without names. This is helpful if you frequently play around with various Bluetooth devices.

11 Default USB Configuration

By default, when you connect your Android phone to a PC, it will only charge the battery and do little else. To transfer data, you have to select the File transfer mode manually. Similarly, if you regularly use your Pixel phone as a webcam with your PC, you need to select the appropriate mode whenever you connect the two devices.

Thankfully, the Default USB configuration setting in Developer options can resolve this issue. Head over to the settings and select the default USB mode. Depending on your device, you might have several options to choose from, including USB tethering, MIDI, PTP, Android Auto, and more.

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

12 Disable Absolute Volume

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

Toggling the Disable Absolute Volume option on means that your phone volume and the Bluetooth device will use two separate volume levels. Try doing so if your Bluetooth device's volume doesn't work properly with your phone or is extremely loud or quiet.

With absolute volume disabled, you can set your Bluetooth device's volume to an acceptable level and then use your phone's volume buttons for fine-tuned adjustments.

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

13 Don't Keep Activities

If you are a developer, you might find the Don't Keep Activities setting in Developer options helpful. When enabled, Android will destroy every app's process as soon as you leave it. You can use this to test how an app behaves under different circumstances.

Do not enable this option to free up more RAM on your phone. Regularly killing background processes will actually do more harm than good in modern Android phones.

There are plenty of other settings in the Developer options menu, but unless you are a developer or like to tinker around with low-level OS settings, you won't find them useful. Still, it's great that Google provides these tools for developers, who would otherwise have to jump through many hoops to recreate certain conditions.