20 Android Tips and Tricks for Getting the Most From Your Phone

It is also rumored to have a 6.58-inch FHD+ LCD screen, a 5,000 mAh battery with 33W fast charging, a side-mounted fingerprige, 4/128GB, and 6/128GB. It is expected to run Android 12 with MIUI 13 on top. The M5 will start under INR 15,000 in India, rumor has it. On the other hand, the M5s is said to arrive in three color versions - gray, blue, and white - and it should have exactly the same storage options as its sibling.

1. Uninstall Apps You Don’t Need

Most Android phones come with a healthy helping of preinstalled apps. Many will be welcomed by nearly everyone—maps, email, browser, and so on—but there are undoubtedly some you don’t want or need. If you’re just not a podcast person, you don’t need a podcast app. And phone vendors tend to include a bunch of their own apps that you may never need to use. Simply long-press an app’s icon and then select the i entry to get to its detail page where you can uninstall it.

Unfortunately, there are some stock apps you cannot uninstall. For example, if you only use Firefox or Edge as your web browser, you still can't uninstall Google’s Chrome browser. For those apps, you can at least choose Disable, which will hide them from the interface and free up system resources.

2. Use Digital Wellbeing Features

It’s not the healthiest thing in the world to stay up all night texting and doomscrolling(Opens in a new window). Android 11’s Bedtime mode is part of the Digital Wellbeing feature. Not only does it silence your phone at a set time, it also changes the screen to black-and-white, in case you do have to look at the screen after hours. There’s a Pause option in the dropdown menu if you need more time before retiring. If you're looking for more sleep tips, you should read our feature on how tech can help (and hurt) your sleep.

Another recommended Wellbeing feature is Focus mode, which silences noisy apps’ notifications. Some phones, including recent Pixels and Motorolas, turn on Do Not Disturb mode when you set them down with the screen facing down—a quick and easy way to get relief from disturbances. Finally, using Work Profile hides all those productivity apps when it’s time to relax.

3. Set Up the Your Phone App in Windows

Recent Samsung devices and the Surface Duo phone get even more possibilities with the Link to Windows option, including running multiple Android apps on the desktop in the Your Phone app. If you’re not running Windows, you can get Android messages on the web—another capability annoyingly not offered by Apple’s mobile OS. You can also run Android apps in an emulator on either Windows or macOS, but that route is not as convenient as Windows 10’s Your Phone.