How To: Speed Up Transitions & Animations on Your Galaxy S9

Speed Up Transitions & Animations on Your Galaxy S9

Samsung just launched their Galaxy S9 flagship, with preorders shipping in the US already. The Galaxy S9 is an amazing smartphone, with a number of advanced features. Despite this, over time your S9 or S9+ may slow down a bit more than you would like. Thankfully, there is a longstanding trick in the Android community that can speed things up a bit.

Before we get started, it is worth noting that this method will not actually increase the speed of your phone. That is to say, it will not actually improve processor speed or affect individual app performance. What this method does is speed up the overall time spent navigating the user interface and jumping between apps. In particular, we are going to reduce the animation and transition duration on your Galaxy S9.

Step 1: Enable Developer Options

The option to reduce the animation and transition duration is not something Samsung puts front and center. For this reason, you need to enable Developer Options to access it. We have a quick and easy-to-follow guide on doing that for the Galaxy S9 linked out below, but to sum it up, head to Settings –> About Phone –> Software Information and tap "Build Number" 7 times.

Step 2: Tune the Animation & Transition Scales

Next, select Developer Options at the bottom of the main settings list menu. From there, navigate down to the three options titled "Window animation scale," "Transition animation scale," and "Animator duration scale" in the Drawing sub-header. Each of these options is set to 1x scale by default, but you can edit the scale to your liking for each option.

Our recommendation is to set all three of the options to .5x scale. This will double the speed of the animations that occur when you move in and out of apps, as well as transitions between stock menus in the UI. There is also the option to turn the animation completely off, but this can be a bit jarring when actually using the phone.

That's all there is to it. Keep in mind that this will simply speed up the time you spend navigating around the UI, and will not affect actual hardware performance. In addition, some of the lag on your device may be due to other apps hogging resources — for this, you can read our tutorial on disabling such apps. Let us know in the comments if you prefer to leave animations on default, or speed them up.

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Cover image and screenshots by Jeff Springer/Gadget Hacks

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