What’s up guys, David here and when you ask any real Android enthusiast why they choose
to use an Android phone over 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 – everyone customizes their phones a little 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 to maybe give you enthusiasts
some fresh new ideas you might want to integrate into your own setup.
So, 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 want to know exactly where everything is
so I don’t waste time swiping back and forth looking for an app, and if possible I want
my phone to predict what I want before I even want it.
Which if you think about it, all combine to make your phone experience faster.
Like the phone itself obviously doesn’t get faster, but these customizations let you
USE your phone faster – if that makes any sense.
Kind of like the old saying, it’s not the car it’s the driver.
Anyways, the first thing we’ll take a look at it is the home screen.
I’m using a custom launcher in Nova launcher which lets you take your customization game
to the next level.
I’ve got my most commonly used apps and folders on the main screen, and if you notice
I have custom icons for each and every single app with an icon pack called Materialistik.
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.
In terms of Widgets, up top is a weather widget I customized using HD Widgets, and on both
the left and the right home screens I have separate checklists using an app called Todoist.
To match my three home screens I have three dock pages at the bottom.
So the main one is for commonly used apps, the one on the left is for quickly controlling
my Philips Hue lights in my bedroom, and the one on the right is for settings shortcuts
like battery, storage, and a toggle for quickly maxing out the screen timeout on my display
I also have a bunch of gestures that I can use on the home screen for quickly launching
apps, and I’ve set them up in way where they’re easy to remember, because if you
don’t end up remembering the gestures, then there’s 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, and a pinch out toggles an app called Darker that lets
you bring the screen brightness way down below factory levels.
Which pro tip is really useful when you want to check your phone in the middle of night
without blinding yourself.
A swipe down, opens the notification bar without having to reach all the way up to the top.
A swipe up launches the App drawer, just like the Pixel launcher
Which also makes room, for 1 more app to quickly access on the dock
A two finger swipe up launches Google Home for when I want to push my entire screen onto
a Chromecast enabled TV, a two finger swipe down opens the quick toggles, where I actually
have a few custom toggles installed for things like seeing what’s on my clipboard and a
shortcut to add reminders, which I added using an app called Tiles.
A tap and swipe up jumps directly into the nearby traffic menu in Google Maps for when
I want to get up and go, and a tap and swipe down opens 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
drawer go beyond just one screen.
This is partly because of my OCD where having an uneven amount of icons just kills me, and
partly because I don’t want to swipe between multiple screens which tends to make apps
a little harder to find.
Now if you notice, any of apps that show up 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 cleaner,
but by only accessing an app in one way every single time I use it, it keeps that method
of accessing it fresh my memory, ultimately cutting down on the time it takes for me to
find that app later on.
Up in the status bar, by unlocking the System UI Tuner in the settings, I disabled the icons
for bluetooth and the alarm from even showing up, since I always keep them on anyways and
they don’t really tell me anything I don’t already know unlike the WiFi icon which I
also always keep on but the Wifi icon at least tells me how strong the signal is.
And since stock Android still doesn’t have a good battery percentage indicator, with
the one you can enable in the System Tuner being really hard to see, I have 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 0-100.
Last customization I have 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 the portrait-lock icon there is nice, for the most part I don’t even
have to worry about it since I programmed my phone to enable and disable portrait-lock
automatically using an app called Tasker.
I have it set to turn portrait-lock on at the times there’s a chance I’ll be in
bed, which is the only real time I ever need portrait-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 of these little automations save me from having to open the apps or take the actions
I was going to take anyways, again making the phone experience a little bit 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 customized the volume buttons on
my phone so that a double press of the volume down key both mutes and unmutes the media
volume specifically.
This is nice for those situations where you 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 adjusts
the ringer volume unless some sort of media is already playing.
Another hardware tweak I have takes full advantage of the 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 when I either
have really low battery or when I have no cell signal.
Which all combined save me time by not having to check my phone as often as I otherwise
would have to when I see it's a notification I don’t need to check right that moment.
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 setting at half the
stock animation speed.
But other than that, that’s pretty much the gist of how I customize my Android phones.
Like I said before, my main philosophy when it comes to customization is to make my phone
more efficient.
And honestly, even though I don't always use the fastest phone in the world, I feel like
all these little efficiencies kind of make up for the difference.
Now, everything I showed you here can be done without rooting your phone or anything like
that, and I’ll be linking all of the apps I talked about down below in the description.
Anyways, that is it for me and this video, give it a thumbs up if you liked it, thank
you for watching and as always I’ll see you in the very next episode!