Gadgetory

when you ask any real Android enthusiast why they choose to use an Android phone instead of using an iPhone at some point or another you're going to hear the word customization now customization means a lot of different things to a lot of different people and that's kind of the point right everyone customizes their phones a little bit differently unless they have an iPhone at which point everyone's phone looks pretty much the same kidding but like not really so today I wanted to show you guys how I customize my Android phone to give you non Android users an idea of what Android customization could look like and maybe give you enthusiasts some fresh new ideas you might want to integrate into your own setup now my main philosophy when customizing my phone is all about maximizing efficiency I want to be able to get to what I want quickly I don't want to have to swipe around screens wasting time going back and forth looking for an app and when possible I want my phone to predict what I want before I even want it which if you think about it all combined to make your phone experience faster like obviously the phone itself doesn't get faster but these customizations let you use your phone faster if that makes any sense anyways the first thing we'll take a look at is the home screen I'm using a custom launcher and nova launcher which lets you take your customization game to the next level I've got my most commonly used apps and folders in my main stream and if you notice I have custom icons for each and every app with an icon pack called materialistic I've been using this icon pack for years now and I just love the look of it especially when it comes to the folder icons which makes things look a lot more like a desktop computer than just your ordinary phone I also have a few widgets installed up top of the weather widget I customized using HD widgets and on both the left and the right home screens I have separate check lists using an app called to do is which is really nice because you can check things off right then and there without having to launch the app itself to match my three home screens I have three dot pages at the bottom so the main one is for commonly use that the one on the left is for quickly controlling my Philips hue lights and my bedrooms and the one on the right is for setting shortcuts like battery storage and a toggle for a quickly maxing out the screen time out on my display I also have a bunch of gestures that I can use on the home screen that let me launch apps quickly and I've set them up in a way that they're easy to remember because if you don't end up remembering the gestures and there's like really no point of having them so a double tap on the home screen toggles my flashlight a pinch in launches a magnifier letting me zoom in in real life a pinch out toggle is an app called darker that actually lets you bring your screen brightness down way below factory levels which protip is really useful for when you want to check your phone in the middle of the night and you don't want the phone to blind you it's wiped down opens the notification bar without having to reach all the way up to the top and a swipe up launches the app drawer just like on the pixel launcher which also makes room for one more app to quickly access on the dock a two finger swipe up launches Google home for what I want to push my entire screen onto a chromecast enabled TV and a two finger swipe down opens quick toggles where I actually have custom toggles installed for things like seeing what's on my clipboard and a shortcut to add reminders using an app called tiles a tap and swipe up jumps directly into the nearby traffic menu within Google Maps or when I want to get up and go and a tap and swipe down launches an app called hydro coach which quickly lets me keep track of how much water I down in a day when it comes to my app drawer I have a few folders in the top row and I never let the drawers go beyond just one page this is partly due to my OCD we're having an uneven amount of icons on my home screen will like just kill me and it's partly because I don't want to have to swipe between multiple screens which tends to make apps a little bit harder to find now if you notice and if the apps are either on the home screen have a dedicated widget or show up in the notification bar don't show up here in the app drawer I have these apps hidden because not only does it help keep things looking clean but by only accessing an app and only one way every single time I use it it keeps that method of accessing it fresh in my memory ultimately cutting down on the amount of time it takes me to find it later up in this status bar by unlocking the system UI tuner in the settings i disabled the icon for Bluetooth and the alarm from even showing up since I always keep those on anyways and didn't really tell me anything I don't already know unlike the Wi-Fi icon which I also always keep on but at least the Wi-Fi icon tells me how strong the signal is and since that Android still somehow doesn't have a good battery percentage indicator with the one that you can enable in the system tuner being really to see I'm a thin battery bar going across the top of my phone using an app called energy bar that lets me know what my battery level is on a scale of 0 to 100 last customization I had up in the status bar is an icon I added for screen rotation which tells you whether or not portrait lock is enabled but while having a portrait lock icon there is nice for the most part I don't even have to worry about it since I actually programmed my phone to enable and disable poor Sherlock automatically using an app called Tasker I haven't said so Porsche log gets automatically enabled other times that there's a chance that I'll be using my phone in bed which is like really the only time I ever need Porsche lock enabled otherwise during the rest of the day the phone automatically goes back to auto-rotate I also use Tasker to automatically launch the audible app when my phone connects to the Bluetooth in my car and automatically launch my music app when I connect my headphones all these little automation save me the time from having to open the apps or like take the action that is going to take anyways again making my phone experience a little faster a cool little customization I have for the music app is a visualizer that shows up in the navigation bar at the bottom it works whether I'm on the music app itself or almost any other screen using an app called nav bar which is available for phones using Android nougat and above speaking of music with an app called button mapper I customize the volume buttons on my phone so that a double press of the volume down keys both mutes and unmute the media volume specifically this is nice for those situations where you want to make sure that your phone doesn't make a sound before you open up your next app or game where a regular volume press only adjust the ringer volume unless some sort of media is already playing another hard right to VI have takes full advantage of the phone's LED notification light using an app called light manager I have different colors flash for notifications from different apps so for facebook notifications the LED flashes blue it flashes yellow for snapchat cyan for Twitter Green for missed calls and text messages and red for when I either have really low battery or when I have no cell signal which all combined save me time by not having to actually check my phone for the notifications that I otherwise don't really care about and then finally the most textbook customization for anybody who cares about speed is changing the animation times in the developer settings which I personally like to set at half the stock animation speed but other than that that's pretty much the gist of how I customized all my Android phones like I said before my main philosophy when it comes to customizing my poem is to maximize its efficiency and to be honest even though I don't always use the fastest smartphone in the world I feel like all these little efficiencies combined kind of make up for the difference at least somewhat now everything I've showed you here can be done without rooting your phone or anything like that and I'll be linking every app I talked about down below in the description anyways that is it for me in this video give it a thumbs up if you liked it thank you guys for watching and as always I'll see you in the very next episode