Android tip: Change the animation scale in Developer options for a snappier Android 4.2 experience
The LG Nexus 4 is a pretty fast phone. Between the quad-core processor and stock Android 4.2, there isn’t much to worry about in terms of lag, and the experience is the smoothest that I have ever had on an Android device. However, while poking around in the hidden developer settings area, I found a simple setting that many people may not know about, that can quickly increase the speed of most UI interactions.
The setting is actually three settings, all having to do with animation scale, which can be found towards the bottom of the “Developer options” list. Most important is the first stetting, which allows you to choose a number of different speeds for the window animations. The list goes up to 10x, but the default value is 1x. I found that by switching the value to .5, the transition animations sped up considerably, making the phone feel much faster. I went ahead and changed the other two settings to match just for consistency, but the first one is the most important as it affects the homescreen transition, multitasking animations, and most other animations that I encountered.
Google’s reasoning for setting the animations slightly slower than they could have been is anyone’s guess, but I would think that they wanted to make it clear when transitions and animations were happening. However, I don’t think that changing the speed to .5x makes the experience worse; on the contrary I’m quite enjoying my even snappier feeling Nexus 4 with this simple change.
