What are some cool but underrated Android Features on Android that most people don’t know about? those little things that make life easier but don’t get talked about much. I feel like there’s so much hidden stuff in Android that we miss out on.
The ability to change the launcher (i.e., practically the whole user interface) at will simply by installing an alternative one from your app store of choice, or an APK.
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Digital Wellbeing. Enforce the decisions you made about app usage. Honestly it’s kinda saved my sanity, particularly this year.
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Scheduled text messages. This should be in every single messaging app. I schedule reminders for other people, I schedule messages that I think of at ridiculous hours to go out at reasonable times, I even schedule messages so that sometime else reminds me to do something.
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These might be Pixel only features, but the few that always get iPhone users envious of my phone are:
Battery sharing - Turning the phone into a wireless charger for other phones, including iPhones.
Now Playing - Display whatever music is playing on the lock screen, and keep a history. Great when you’re at a bar and don’t want to open up Shazam or want to go back and see all the music your friend was playing in the car.
Ad Guard - Block ads, even in apps.
If you have a USB C to C cable handy, that’s also going to work to charge other devices, loses less power to the transfer, is quicker, and also more convenient since you can keep using both phones. Of course you’ll often not have a cable, but if you do it’s probably gonna be the better option
The real advantage to the battery share feature (ime) is charging shit like my pixel buds while I also charge my phone, using 1 cable
Wish it worked for my pixel watch, really dropped the ball there google.
I mean, if you want a thick flat rectangular object that digs into your arm, sure yeah.
I went from a Fossil Hybrid HR (and gadgetbridge) with ~28 days of battery life, to the og Pixel Watch that has ~1.5 days (and later the gen 3 for ~2 days), and I hate having to take it off, charge it, throw it back on, all the time… but Qi has never crossed my mind. The contact patch would have to be huge, and basically flat, and my arm gets irritated enough by the hr sensor rubbing my arm all day…
E: I guess it doesn’t have to be square/rectangular but it’s still has to be big as the hr sensor needs to live alongside it, so the patch has to be flat and around the sensor
Doesn’t work on my Pixel 9.charging it disables battery share.
You might need to check the settings for it, I believe you have to set the item on the… Fuck it I’ll go snag a screenshot of my settings app I use this daily
One of these 2 settings might be getting in your way:
You have like 30s to put the device on your phone or it won’t charge and you have to unplug/replug your phone
I dont seem to have that second option in my Pixel
Battery sharing - Turning the phone into a wireless charger for other phones, including iPhones.
My S10 has it. It’s not even an s10+ but a regular S10.
In developers options, turning the animation speeds to .5x
Don’t know if that’s really an underrated feature, but would like to mention it anyway. Everything feels much faster after that. Pretty much the first thing i do when i have a new phone.
Oddly, I set mine to 2x because I like the animation being more… Animated. If I wanted speed I would just turn animation off.
I was just about to say this, it’s a game changer. Some OEMs (Android variants) even have options in the settings to set animation speed or disable them.
Speaking of, if your older phone is ever laggy or feels unresponsive, disable animations entirely. It made my phone feel brand new with how quickly it goes in and out of apps.
Love doing this when people complain their phone is slowing down due to age
i disabled the animations on my old tablet just now. Very nice!
Fun fact if you set it to 1.5x on a samsung, it behaves like an iPhone lol.
Isnt iOS pretty sluggish with the animations? I heard it was on the slower side (as if to show of the animation)
Yeah the reason Androids feel ‘choppy’ compared to iOS is that android lets you take action without finishing the animation, whereas iOS forces you to watch every animation until you can touch the phone again. This is a general trend with iOS, you do as the OS tells you to.
Thanks for reminding, i remember that one if the older android days. Just adjusted it again, its still a really nice mod and speedbump!
Same, at 1x it just takes too long for animations to complete.
I appreciate this setting still existing, especially because some custom skins/UI can be too slow, but IMHO I prefer a balanced/stock value as the animations nowadays are so polished and smooth that I’d rather use it that way than butchering them with faster speeds…
I am using MIUI right now and it has its own version of this, so I just use “balanced mode”.
When I use AOSP I always use stock because even my SD 865 feels weird when the animation is too fast but the app is still loading, I think it kills the momentum lol.
Why not just disable animations entirely?
That’s a bit ugly, imo.
That’s what I do as part of my initial setup on a new phone. It’s so much nicer when you tap something and it just happens instead of waiting for an animation.
Yeah, it breaks some stuff, but only like loading circle animations that try to spin at infinite speed. Nothing bad.
I’ve found it can break things in some apps as well as not look nice (Spotify wrapped, McDonald’s app purchase loading, minor things I know)
Expand the list, these are apps I would never put on my phone. Is there a correlation? I am curious!
I do this mainly because I would get motion sickness from UI animation. Not trolling, see how most mainstream OS developers added disabling animation as an accessibility option.
Too fast
NewPipe, ReVanced patches, screen rotate with the popup, KineStop, and if you’re adventurous: dual boot different ROMs using A/B.
KineStop
Clever idea. Thank you!
iOS already has a built in accessibility option for preventing nausea in a moving vehicle, I think Google is also planning a similar feature in the upcoming Android versions. Until then, KineStop does the job.
Android has support for keyboards. Both USB and Bluetooth keyboards work well and can be used for longer typing.
And a mouse too!
You’re right. This came handy when my phone’s screen broke and the touch sensor didn’t work. With USB mouse and keyboard, I could make a backup.
(Bluetooth would have worked too, if the devices are already paired).
My friend’s phone screen broke. So whenever he received an incoming call, he would take a wired mouse out of his pocket and connect it to his phone to answer the call.
And my axe!
I use a Bluetooth numpad! I got an 8bitdo mechanical numpad and it’s so clicky and satisfying.
With some apps (unsure if any open source ones exist), Android can become a Bluetooth Keyboard for a connected computer too! The keyboard isn’t very useful, but having a portable trackpad for a laptop during presentations may be helpful
There is also Impress Remote for Libreoffice Impress
Pin a app to the screen, so if you need to let someone use their phone they can’t get super nosy.
owner account can have a work profile, separate apps, have two versions of the same app, or just put some apps behind another fingerprint/password (can be different then the main phone unlocks)
Multiple user accounts (totally different accounts, totally different apps) : great if you want to let a kid play games, or let someone search the internet, or if you want to be really clean and keep work apps totally different. Mostly useful on tablets to let multiple people share the tablet.
The ability to run open source apps from fdroid, newpipe is an amazing game changer for anyone who watches youtube. (no ads)
You can have a work profile as well as a private space account. I think the latter is a relatively new feature. Really useful if you want your dating apps or NSFW apps not tied to your personal account.
The only drawback is that the private space cannot use background services so you can’t get notifications of hot MILFs in your area.
How do I do the multiple account thing
I use this pin feature when I give my phone to my kids. They can only use the pinned app and nothing else.
Not sure if this counts as “underrated” but Quick Share / Nearby Share. Its just Airdrop but for Android, not much to explain. It’s built in to all modern Android versions, and some older devices might also have it if they are new enough to have the “Google Play System Update” option on their phone as a separate update option from the main OS update.
Edit: Actually, its reportedly available for every android phone with Android Version 6.0 or newer.
Yeah it’s a shame Google dragged it’s feet so long and unlike all the crap they advertise but then release only. For the US for the next 6 years, they never went loud about this. So much the easiest way to share.
I wonder if it is too hard for Google to convince Apple to implement this with iOS, even in the form of an app…
I just used pairdrop.net a couple hours ago because I was too lazy to install LocalSend in my gf’s iPhone and it was a breeze to use to share a short video from there to my Android device…
Ah, what would we do without the EU.
I’ve tried it a few times and never gotten it to work. It sees both devices, but the connection times out.
This is not an Android feature. This is a Google feature and I believe it relies on a round-trip through their servers too.
Try other app stores like fdroid
Not an app “store” per se, but Obtainium
That is not an Android feature…
It really is an exclusive Android feature.
But if you can load open source apps without using the Apple app store, I’d love to learn how.
F-Droid is available on iOS?
No but different app stores are also available on other systems. iOS and Android aren’t the only players in town, even though the others have miniscule market share in the west.
If you use the 3 button navigation, there are options for long press of buttons. “Kill foreground app” as back button long-press action is just indispensable when something goes wrong.
Used to use the hell outta that.
Is this only in custom ROMs, or is there a way to do it through normal settings?
No idea, I haven’t used a stock Android system for about 10 years.
Go to Settings and search for “long press action”.
Edit: this setting has been available in Developer Settings in earlier Androids, so maybe if the official rom doesn’t have the proper setting, you can find it there.
On the calendar, I can set people’s birthdays with a yearly reminder so they think I’m super thoughtful for remembering their birthdays. But the phone notified me.
Happens automatically if you put the birthday on the contact, too
*if you use Google’s Contacts and Calendar services
(I am very much separated from G and my contacts and calendar are hosted on my nas via radicale, so this feature doesn’t exist - but I just made a calendar for birthdays myself, and add when needed)
That’s not an Android feature, every digital calendar does that.
Mine doesn’t (radicale) so…
oops
As a forgetful person this feature is absolutely essential. I put the person’s name and year of birth in the calendar event too.
I had a coworker that had the birthdays of his contacts at the end of each of them, so he would see that date anytime he chatted with them (us?) through WhatsApp.
I don’t question his methods, but that worked for him.
Birday is a nice simple app that I like, it shows all upcoming birthdays and how many days until they happen. Just pulls the data from your calendar so no setup needed.
Other ROMs like Lineage.
An application like tasker makes you realise the weird and amazing stuff you can do.
I’ve used Tasker a lot years ago, but really wish this was backed into the OS. Everything feels very hacky and janky setting up routines via Tasker. Some apps supported Tasker which was nice, but for ones that didn’t, using AutoInput was such a pain. Having official support on the OS level would be so nice. Apple Shortcuts is like the only thing I think iOS does better than Android.
I know Samsung phones can do something similar with a built in Modes and Routines feature. They allow you to access things that otherwise would require root from tasker.
What do you use it for?
I’ve had it for a while,
but ended up uninstalling it,
since I could not think of a good use case.I need to re set mine up, but my main use cases were opening a music app and playing music, opening Waze, and turning off text notifications if I connected to my cars blue tooth; and connecting to my VPN if I left my home WiFi.
Something else I wanna try soon is silencing my phones notifications if I’m connected to KDE connect on my desktop, since they should come through on the computer anyway
When I started first using Tasker back in around 2013 or so, I was mesmerized but what you could do with it. This was because at the time, too, I was rooted, so it really changed the possibilities with modes and so forth with Tasker. For example, NFC unlocking the phone when you tapped it to a NFC tag while the screen was OFF. That was killed by Google in Android 5 but before then, it was awesome! Tap on the tag and your phone would perform whatever task you told it do. Over the years, Google and other Android makers have slowly added different functions that Tasker was doing before them.
Since Tasker was taken over by the current Dev, it’s make many leaps and bounds over what it could before and simpler now. My tasks are:
Turn volume up ALL THE WAY for specific contacts and then back to the before volumes after the call. I have an older mother which hopefully live longer than 10 more years, but closing in on 80 years young, she’s going to get more fragile with her age so, my sister who lives near her, can call me in any issues pop up. (I live about 5 hours away). So, it’s essential to know when she’s calling me. On the same theme, when she texts me, I have it announce via TTS that she sent me a text. It’s also handy for when my wife calls me!
The phone restores the volume from silent when unplugged from the power charger in the morning ONLY after 7AM. I work from home and awake around 4:30am daily and around 7 is a good time to return sounds in the home. But, it is also conditional, so if on the weekend, I don’t wake up until 8am), it won’t turn sound on until I unplug it. (NOTE: The tasks to raise volume for the callers will override this mode which is good!)
The phone also turns the volume off at 9pm nightly since there’s no reason to have it make noise after then, all are home and pretty much it’s peaceful time.
The phone also sends a signal to my August Lock to send the unlock command when it put it my back pocket by reading a NFC Tag which contains a webhook to call Home Assistant to give the unlock instruction to the door lock.
When certain apps I define are open, it keeps the screen on all the time. I use this all the time when I’m at the store and running a calculator so it’s always up. A few other apps as well, but not too many.
A few others such as toggling the Private DNS server on my phone (I use dns.adguard-dns.com) on the phone to block advertisements and sometimes it doesn’t work so having a widget to toggle that off and on is super nice instead of navigating to it in settings.
I used to use Wiregaurd (Now on Tailscale), but before then, I had a task which would auto connect me to the Wireguard tunnel on my home network immediately disconnected from my WiFi, this ensured that I was always 100% on my home network. Tailscale does the same thing (If you set it to be always connected to your tunnel) , but I’ve been playing with that for a bit over a year and have pretty much settled there for now. My wireguard Tasker Profile for anyone interested:
Before the lock down of Covid, I used to have a profile which I still keep on which would trigger if I was NEAR a SSID for my work to silence my phone and restore the volume if I was away from it (or if I’m connected to my car’s stereo bluetooth if near the SSID). This worked flawlessly and never worried about stupid app notifications during work which would be frowned on. I occasionally go to the office and forget sometimes it’s triggered. :)
One that I’ve worked on for the last years, so sparingly was making a Google Voice robot which would see which contact you called and then send the calls through Google Voice instead of my phone dialer. I’ve made it work but not all the time, so never have trusted it. (I only give my cell number to my family and very trusted friends, everyone else gets my Google Voice number).
My Voice Robot project which is stale as I’ve had been busy with health issues off and on and life events otherwise:
Overall, your imagination is the limiting factor for what you can do with Tasker, the dev has also made it so you can take 100% control over the phone by making Tasker the device owner which bypasses the need for root. I haven’t done it with my Pixel, but on the Samsung I had, it worked, but broke a work app so I disabled it (Requires a factory reset to enable and also disable it).
I use it to play the Wii Shop Channel theme when I open the Play Store
I’m sorry I made you have to re-download Tasker again now
I have a few routines that I use.
For example,
I have one that auto rotates some apps.
One that sends a notification to my watch when the phone is fully charged.
Another that enables NFC when I open the wallet app and disables it automatically.
Another that enables auto rotate, silences phone, and enables DND when playing games.
Thank you, those are some interesting/good use cases indeed!
Some Android versions let you map the flashlight to the volume buttons and you can toggle it by pressing both at the same time. The option can be found in the system settings. If your OS does not have the setting, you can map the keys with an app like Torchie. It’s probably the feature I use the most on my phone, I couldn’t live without it at this point.
FlashDim on F-Droid can do this as well, if you look for an open source option (don’t know Torchie, maybe it’s OSS as well, then I at least brought up another option)
Thanks for the suggestion, Torchie is also on F-Droid :)
Yeah, stupidly checked after posting…
Although it shows up to be compiled for an earlier Android version and might not be compatible
Well, at least an option more… ;-)
Check out the eye gaze function. Also Action Blocks. They’re both cool assistive tech things that can be helpful, but trying them out shows you how difficult and exhausting it would be to have to use them for every task.
