The
Developer Options menu in Android is a hidden menu with a variety of
advanced options. These options are intended for developers, but many of
them will be interesting to geeks.You’ll
have to perform a secret handshake to enable the Developer Options menu
in the Settings screen, as it’s hidden from Android users by default. Follow the simple steps to quickly enable Developer Options.
Enable USB Debugging
“USB
debugging” sounds like an option only an Android developer would need,
but it’s probably the most widely used hidden option in Android. USB
debugging allows applications on your computer to interface with your
Android phone over the USB connection.
This is required for a variety of advanced tricks, including rooting an Android phone, unlocking it, installing a custom ROM, or even using a desktop program that captures screenshots of your Android device’s screen. You can also use ADB commands to push and pull files between your device and your computer or create and restore complete local backups of your Android device without rooting.
USB
debugging can be a security concern, as it gives computers you plug
your device into access to your phone. You could plug your device into
a malicious USB charging port,
which would try to compromise you. That’s why Android forces you to
agree to a prompt every time you plug your device into a new computer
with USB debugging enabled.
Disable or Speed Up Animations
When
you move between apps and screens in Android, you’re spending some of
that time looking at animations and waiting for them to go away. You
can disable these animations entirely by changing the Window animation
scale, Transition animation scale, and Animator duration scale options
here. If you like animations but just wish they were faster, you can
speed them up.
On
a fast phone or tablet, this can make switching between apps nearly
instant. If you thought your Android phone was speedy before, just try
disabling animations and you’ll be surprised how much faster it can seem
Force-Enable FXAA For OpenGL Games
If
you have a high-end phone or tablet with great graphics performance and
you play 3D games on it, there’s a way to make those games look even
better. Just go to the Developer Options screen and enable the Force 4x
MSAA option.
This
will force Android to use 4x multisample anti-aliasing in OpenGL ES 2.0
games and other apps. This requires more graphics power and will
probably drain your battery a bit faster, but it will improve image
quality in some games. This is a bit like force-enabling antialiasing
using the NVIDIA Control Panel on a Windows gaming PC.
See How Bad Task Killers Are
We’ve
written before about how task killers are worse than useless on
Android. If you use a task killer, you’re just slowing down your system
by throwing out cached data and forcing Android to load apps from system
storage whenever you open them again.
Don’t
believe us? Enable the Don’t keep activities option on the Developer
options screen and Android will force-close every app you use as soon as
you exit it. Enable this app and use your phone normally for a few
minutes — you’ll see just how harmful throwing out all that cached data
is and how much it will slow down your phone.
Don’t actually use this option unless
you want to see how bad it is! It will make your phone perform much
more slowly — there’s a reason Google has hidden these options away from
average users who might accidentally change them.
Fake Your GPS Location
The
Allow mock locations option allows you to set fake GPS locations,
tricking Android into thinking you’re at a location where you actually
aren’t. Use this option along with an app likeFake GPS location and you can trick your Android device and the apps running on it into thinking you’re at locations where you actually aren’t.
How
would this be useful? Well, you could fake a GPS check-in at a location
without actually going there or confuse your friends in a
location-tracking app by seemingly teleporting around the world.
Stay Awake While Charging
You can use Android’s Daydream Mode to
display certain apps while charging your device. If you want to force
Android to display a standard Android app that hasn’t been designed for
Daydream Mode, you can enable the Stay awake option here. Android will
keep your device’s screen on while charging and won’t turn it off.
It’s like Daydream Mode, but can support any app and allows users to interact with them.
Show Always-On-Top CPU Usage
You
can view CPU usage data by toggling the Show CPU usage option to On.
This information will appear on top of whatever app you’re using. If
you’re a Linux user, the three numbers on top probably look familiar —
they represent the system load average. From left to right, the numbers
represent your system load over the last one, five, and fifteen minutes.
This
isn’t the kind of thing you’d want enabled most of the time, but it can
save you from having to install third-party floating CPU apps if you
want to see CPU usage information for some reason.
Most
of the other options here will only be useful to developers debugging
their Android apps. You shouldn’t start changing options you don’t
understand.
If
you want to undo any of these changes, you can quickly erase all your
custom options by sliding the switch at the top of the screen to Off.
Set a Desktop Backup Password
If
you use the above ADB trick to create local backups of your Android
device over USB, you can protect them with a password with the Set a
desktop backup password option here. This password encrypts your backups
to secure them, so you won’t be able to access them if you forget the
password.
Pointer Location
This
is a fully developer mode option ,in these option you can see where you
touch screen and he show the exact location of your touch.
Show Touches
This is very cool option you can see where you touch the screen and he shows the white dot.
