How to Enable Developer Options on Your Android Device

Developer Options is a hidden section within the user interface of your Android smartphone/tablet which gives you the ability to alter the behaviour of the Android operating system, thus allowing you to monitor and debug apps and games. In this section, you can enable/disable USB/Wireless debugging, change graphics driver settings, show the refresh rate of your device, configure more Wi-Fi settings, view and control running services, and more.

As you would expect, gaining access to these options varies a bit from manufacturer to manufacturer, but the process is mostly the same across the board.

Follow these steps to enable Developer Options:

• 1. Open the Settings App and find the Build number option;
• 2. Once you find this button, tap it 7 times until the screen displays the You are now a developer! message;
• 3. Now that the option is active, go back to the previous screen and you should find the Developer Options at the bottom of the screen.

When you access the Developer Options section of your device, you should always let the button on the On position. If you toggle off this button, you will have to go through the three steps written above to reactivate Developer Options. Now, let's go through the most important features and options you can configure while inside the Developer Options module.

General options

These options are the ones that show up right beneath the On button. Do not panic if you don't see a General options section or subsection here.

Right off the bat, you can go inside the Memory option and see the average memory usage and which applications and games use the most of your device's RAM memory.

If you want the screen of your phone or tablet to stay on while charging, you should enable the Stay awake option.

How about you decide how the operating system handles the software updates for your device? By enabling the Auto update system option, you can configure the smartphone or tablet to apply updates when the device restarts.

Perform USB and Wi-Fi debugging on your device

Before you get to use any of these two features, first you have to activate them by toggling their respective buttons to the On position. Once you do this, you have to ability to debugg and solve various issues when you either connect your device to the computer, through the USB cable, or to any Wi-Fi connection.

Networking

The Networking Options section brings multiple methods to adjust DHCP and Wi-Fi settings.

One of the most important option inside Networking is the ability to set the default USB configuration by choosing between multiple options, such as: transferring files, USB tethering, transferring images, MIDI, charging phone only, etc.

Another relatively good option is the Bluetooth Audio Codec. This small feature allows you to choose between various codes for your Android device, including AAC, SBC, SSC (Samsung Seamless Codec), LDAC, and aptX.

Apps

Here, you can play around with a few options. If you don't want your phone to keep a record of your activity inside your apps, you can enable the Don't keep activities feature. Furthermore, you can set a background process limit with just two taps on the screen, but I advise you to leave it to the Standard Limit value.

Do you want a pop-up window to show up on the screen each time an application crashes? Well, you can do that by enabling the Always show crash dialog option.

Another interesting option inside Apps is the Standby apps one because you can go through a full list of your installed applications and configure their individual standby behaviour. Pretty neat!

Hardware Accelerated Rendering

Hardware Acceleration is the act of using a hardware accelerator to perform specific processing that is done way faster compared to the software counterpart. This section let you leverage the GPU of your Android device to boost the performance in specific scenarios.

One of the most important options here is Simulate color space. This small option brings you the ability to alter the entire color scheme of your device's user interface. The options you find inside this window are related to types of color blindness. Choose between the following values: Disabled, Monochromacy (the color scheme is limited to black, white, and gray), Deuteranomaly (red-green), Protanomaly (red-green), and Tritanomaly (blue-yellow).

If you are interested in using only the Dark mode when you access your apps, you can enable Force Dark mode option with just one tap on the screen. This small feature forces apps to use the Dark mode even if it's not fully supported. The drawback is that it might cause problems in some situations, so use it with caution.

As a notice. The options you will find inside Developer Options and its subsections varies from device to device.