android developer options menu

Credit: Andy Walker / Android Authority

While Android phones offer plenty of settings that you can play around with to personalize your devices, some of you may want more control. For that, you can access developer options on your phones by heading to the about phone section in the settings menu and repeatedly tapping the build number.

Once accessed, developer options give you many granular controls over your Android phone. For instance, you can limit background processes, simulate or hide notches, speed up animations, and much more. Of course, some of these options are only understood by trained professionals. But even if you’re an average joe, you could just do some extra reading online and tweak the developer options to make the most of your Android phones.

With that in mind, we polled you, our readers, to check how many of you activate developer options on your phones. Here’s how you voted and what you had to say.

Do you activate developer options on your phone?

Results

Being the Android power users that you are, it’s not surprising that most of you activate developer options on your phones. 85% of the 2,665 votes we received in our poll show that tinkering with developer options is indeed your thing.

Meanwhile, 14.1% of you don’t use these options at all. It’s possible that you never felt the need for tweaking anything more than what the regular settings have to offer and that’s just fine.

Your comments

EeZeEpEe: Animation scaling to 0.5x every time I get a phone.

Skifarterking: First thing that I do on a new phone or fresh install. This followed by scaling down the animation and turn ADB on.

Joe Black: I do, but often than not it’s just to micromanage Bluetooth audio.

Montisaquadeis: Bluetooth settings, USB Debugging, system-Wide Dark Mode for apps that don’t offer one, split-screen for apps that don’t offer it. Many reasons why I enable it on my Samsung devices.

Ozzie Khoo: When moving from One UI 2 to 2.5, Samsung moved the “Disable absolute volume” option (it’s the one where it syncs your Bluetooth device’s volume controls, however for me I found it better to have this separate because I could get finer control). Samsung moved this from the Bluetooth settings to the Developer Options. Would really prefer if it stayed in the Bluetooth settings so I didn’t have to enable Dev options though.

Derek Scott: (Developer mode) Force Dark Mode. Need I say more?

ANTHONYinCALI: Of course lol That animation scaling is so important to the feel of the phone. It’s like night and day.

thesecondsight: On my Moto G Power running Android10, I use Developer Options to disable animations, automatic updates & change the phone’s theme and fonts.

EasyCare: I don’t turn it on. Most of the settings are unnecessary and Android is already fine (plus, I’m not a developer), so it’s a good thing that it’s still available as a choice, but tucked under build number away from average users!