GreenbotĪs its name suggests, the Power notifications toggle gives you greater control over your alerts. In Nougat, it’s been moved to the Developer options tab. All it does is strip the status bar of any notification icons and makes sure the battery icon shows fully charged. Marshmallow’s Demo mode might not be as useful, however, unless you’re a developer or a tech journalist who takes a lot of screenshots.
Marshmallow’s Embedded battery percentage option (which can be found at the bottom of the Status bar tab in Nougat) lets you show how much juice you have left via a tiny number inside the icon. If you’re tired of staring at the same icons every day, you can turn some (or all) of them off to stop them from appearing. Tap on it and you’ll see a page of toggles representing each of the icons that appear in the status bar. You can select which status bar icons you want to show inside System UI Tuner.Īs you might have guessed, the Status bar tab does the same thing across both versions. And in its most recent incarnation in Nougat, there are also three options, for Status bar, Do not disturb, and Other. For phones that are still on Marshmallow, there will be three: Status bar, Show embedded battery percentage and Demo mode. Tune-upĭepending on the version you’re running, you’ll see different options inside System UI Tuner. For example, during the Nougat beta testing, both a night mode and a dark theme could be enabled via the System UI Tuner, but only the night mode made it into the shipping version (as Night Light), while we’re still waiting for a dark theme to re-emerge. Over its near-two-year existence, the System UI Tuner has contained a variety of options, some of which have been moved into the main settings and others that have disappeared. Proceed with caution.” However, it’s one of the first things we do at Greenbot whenever we get a new phone, and we’ve never experienced any real problems with it. Greenbotĭuring beta testing, the System UI Tuner is filled with all sorts of goodies.Īlso, as is the case with any beta or developer feature, there’s no guarantee that the toggles will work properly, as evidenced by the warning at the bottom of the window: “These experimental features may change, break, or disappear in future releases. Most notably there is no way to activate the menu on the Galaxy S7. While System UI Tuner is guaranteed to work on Nexus and Pixel phones, your mileage may vary with other manufacturers. Tap it and you’ll open up a set of options for tweaking the interface. In the second-to-last spot, you’ll see a new System UI Tuner option, right above the About phone tab. To get to the menu, scroll all the way to the bottom of the settings screen. Once you let go, the tiny cog will roll away and you’ll be taken to the Settings app and a box will appear saying, “Congrats! System UI has been added to Settings.”
Then, tap and hold the gear icon in the top right of the screen for a few seconds (on newer phones you’ll feel a vibration upon activation).
GreenbotĮnabling the System UI Tuner is easy, but you need to know how to do it.įirst, you need to pull down the notification shade. And it's still there, hidden away from casual users. However, once the third preview came along, Google stopped making it something you could accidentally stumble upon and changed it to a hidden menu that needs to be activated through a very deliberate process. It was sort of a preview of features that Google was still working on the menu could be found under the System heading. When the Marshmallow preview launched in 2015, it brought a menu of customization options in Settings called System UI Tuner.
With a little tinkering we can completely change the look of our phones, whether it’s through rooting, flashing a custom ROM, or installing a third-party launcher.īut if you’re a little skittish at the thought of voiding your warranty and possibly bricking your phone, you can still tweak Android with a few tricks via the System UI Tuner, a feature Google has built right into Settings. And it’s not just wallpapers and ringtones. One of the things that makes Android, well, Android is the incredible control we have over the interface.