Hollis Johnson/Business Insider
- There's a hidden setting in Android phones, including Samsung's new Galaxy S10, that makes them feel faster.
- The setting essentially reduces the animations when you navigate around the phone.
- The phones themselves aren't really any faster, but the reduced animations will make the phones feel a lot snappier.
One of the first things I noticed about the Galaxy S10 wasn't actually a good thing - it felt pretty slow.
I knew that couldn't be right. The Galaxy S10 sports the latest and greatest Snapdragon 855 processor from mobile chipmaker Qualcomm, and the phone comes with a generous 8GB of RAM for smoother and faster switching between apps.
Then I realized that I hadn't yet tweaked the Galaxy S10 like I had with the previous phone I was using - the OnePlus 6T McLaren Edition - to make it "feel" faster than it did out of the box.
Indeed, you can tweak the Galaxy S10 the same way I did the OnePlus 6T with a hidden settings menu called "Developer options." Essentially, it lets you reduce the animations when you open and close apps, unlock the phone, swipe down the notifications shade, pull up the app drawer, and it even makes apps feel faster when you tap around on them.
The Galaxy S10 isn't set to some kind of overdrive mode. All it's doing is limiting the animations that are only there for aesthetic purposes. You can completely turn off these animations if you like, but it'll feel very utilitarian.
Worthy of note, the Galaxy S10 has another option to make the phone feel a little faster, which I'll show you below, as well as the hidden Developer option.
Check it out: