Android is a highly customizable operating system, but if you're tired of it... appearance, installing a custom launcher may not be enough; there are other, more radical tools for changing its interface. We will tell you about them today.

Custom launcher

The easiest way to change the external Android view- install a new launcher to replace the standard one. IN Google Play The market can find time-tested classics like Nova or Apex, but also more experimental launchers (for example, with sorting applications based on the color of their icons). Which one you choose is a matter of your taste.

This application allows you to create unique live wallpapers that no one else has. The basis is any image, which you can change as you like, add a gradient, any text and even a widget. Usually live wallpapers show a looping video or animation, but not KLWP. Wallpapers created in this application are much more useful - they can show news, weather, schedule, buttons to control the player and much more. Many plugins with additional customization have been released for the application.

With this application you can create unique widgets. Widgets can be anything: with a clock, weather forecast, battery and memory sensors, maps, buttons to control the player, etc. IN Play Store you can find several dozen ready-made widgets with additional settings appearance.

Minimalist Wallpaper

Minimalist Wallpaper is a simple application with access to more than a thousand wallpapers made in a minimalist style. Wallpapers are sorted by category. Any image can be enlarged, cropped, edited directly in this application, in general - tailored specifically to the desktop of a particular smartphone.

Dynamic Notifications lets you customize the appearance of notifications on the blocking page, as well as filter out apps you don't want to receive notifications from. It uses smartphone sensors and saves energy by preventing the screen from lighting up if the smartphone is in a bag, pocket or back cover up. The coolest thing is that this application adds the Always On function to any smartphone (the screen lights up when it receives a notification, you don’t need to press the power button).

Floatify Lockscreen

Floatify Lockscreen adds to older smartphones Android versions One of the main innovations of Nougat is the ability to respond to messages in instant messengers through the notification curtain or from the blocking page. If a message doesn't require a response or you don't have anything to say, you can mark it as read so it won't bother you anymore.

Screen brightness

The screen eats up the lion's share of the battery charge. First, turn on adaptive brightness control if your smartphone has such a function. If this feature is missing, manually set the brightness to the minimum level acceptable to you.

Wallpaper

Want your battery to last longer? Then firmly and forever say “no” to animated wallpapers.

If your smartphone has an OLED display, then installing black wallpaper will help extend the operating time. Read about why and how it works.

Time before display turns off

You can leave your smartphone on the table, and its screen will work in vain for a few more minutes, using up precious battery power. Reduce the time until the display turns off when not in use. Usually 15–30 seconds is enough. Experiment and find the optimal time for yourself.

Order in applications

When you pick up another smartphone, you can feel a strong sense of surprise at the amount of garbage in it. Remember correct sequence actions with applications:

• Option one: installed → didn’t like it → deleted.
• Option two: installed → not using → deleted.

The problem for users is that they often ignore the last point. As a result, the device turns into a real landfill. What's bad about it? Many applications like to take on a life of their own. They hang out in the background, launch their processes and eat up precious memory, which increases power consumption and reduces system performance.

Additionally, unused applications are updated and exchanged data, resulting in increased costs. mobile traffic and an even greater reduction in battery life.

Consider a monthly Smartphone Day. Spend a little time analyzing your current collection of applications, removing irrelevant ones, and looking on Lifehacker for more advanced analogues of existing ones.

Automation

Every day, a smartphone user faces a routine. Small, but necessary actions, if there are a lot of them, they take a lot of time and are annoying. Send something somewhere, copy it, send it, put it aside, and so on and so forth.

The problem is solved using the IFTTT (If This Then That) automation service. What can he do? All. On this moment In IFTTT, more than a million applets (recipes) have been created and made publicly available for free - ready-made tools for automating a particular action or task.

Physical protection

As smartphones become more and more sophisticated, they lose their durability. If an old Nokia 3310 can play football and hammer nails, then a brand new iPhone or Google Pixel much more tender. You need to take care of the safety of your expensive electronic assistant in advance and purchase a protective case. This is especially true during active recreation and travel.

Plan in case of loss

Losing a smartphone is a real tragedy. This situation is also accompanied by the loss of important and private information. In this case, Lifehacker advises using cloud storage. They are now perfectly optimized for mobile devices and implement all the necessary functions automatically.

We hope these tips will help you use your smartphone more efficiently.

Articles and Lifehacks

If you are one of those mobile phone owners who are annoyed by the slow operation of the device, then you should know how to make Android faster so that it quickly loads photos and does not slow down when playing videos.

To speed up your device:

• Install new firmware to the gadget. Usually, the latest firmware versions eliminate all the problems that were present in earlier versions of the OS.
• Restore factory settings. This method is a hard method, since during the process of installing factory settings, absolutely all files on the device are erased.

  To prevent this, save the information you need on removable media or make a backup copy.

• Download the Task Manager application from Google Play Market, which closes inactive applications.
• Install antivirus on your device. Sometimes the operation of a gadget slows down due to the fact that the device contains a large number of viruses.
• Download the Start Up Manager program, it can reduce the number of applications downloaded when the device is turned on.
• Run the Cache Cleaner application, which clears the device's memory and frees up a small amount of memory.
• Erase programs you don't use.

Other ways to speed up your device

You can also try other speedup methods:

1. Reboot your device.
2. You can try to overclock the processor, but it is better that this action is performed by specialists, otherwise you may break your gadget.
3. Try using a custom firmware version. Of course, it differs from the professional one, but, as practice shows, in most cases it works better than it.
4. Try not to run several programs at the same time and not play games that your gadget cannot handle.

These simple manipulations will make your device work faster, and you won’t have to look for a new device that will fully satisfy all your requirements.

Each of us knows the effect of novelty. The first days and even weeks you adore the thing you bought. Handle it carefully, blow off specks of dust from it. But over time, the thing becomes boring and sometimes even annoying.

The same goes for our smartphones. But a smartphone, as a rule, is quite expensive, and only rich people can replace it very often. If you don’t consider yourself one of these, then you can restore the effect of novelty with the help. You can also bring back the joy of using your phone by greatly changing its settings and the appearance of the system.

You've probably already heard that for major changes to your smartphone you need to get root access, that is, full access to all system settings. But that's not true! Let's see how you can change your smartphone without voiding your warranty.

Changing the home screen

Most often, you see the home screen of your smartphone. After all, this is where the icons of programs that you often need are located. Also, most likely, widgets that are important to you are located here. This means that you should start changing the appearance of your smartphone’s system from this screen.

There are dozens of different launchers that will change your home screen beyond recognition. Have you bought an Android smartphone but want to try Windows? No problem, that's what it's for. In addition, there are very, which are not at all similar to any of the systems. They also exist to suit your requirements, but not just once during setup, but at every moment when you use your phone. I also advise you to pay attention to our author Dmitry Gorchakov.

Although most launchers also provide their own set of icons, it is not a fact that you will like it. But you have the opportunity to choose the icons that you like. We have already introduced you to Lifehacker for your smartphone.

Install new widgets. This is also a good way to update your home screen. Most likely, you have a clock widget installed on your home screen. Change it to something more functional. You will have access to more information from the home screen. For example, I have one widget displaying the time, weather and the next alarm.

And the final touch to changing your home screen is, of course, setting new screensaver. If you have Android 5 with Material Design, then best choice will be . You also have the opportunity to put . They will change depending on what the weather is like outside the window.

And now a little about harmful, but beautiful. I'm talking about live wallpapers. Harmful for your smartphone battery, but beautiful for your eyes. On Lifehacker you can learn how to make live wallpaper yourself.

Changing the lock screen

The second step to changing the appearance of your smartphone system is changing the lock screen. This is exactly the screen you see when you turn on your smartphone. You can start by installing a new lockscreen screensaver.

For this screen there are also a large number special applications. They will radically change the look of your smartphone's lock screen. Just like with changing the home screen, you can give the lockscreen a different style operating system. For example, put it, which is made in the style of an iPhone. There are more that can display weather and other information.

Installing a new keyboard

When using a smartphone, we are almost constantly entering some text. For example, we write messages to friends, dial emails At work, we are looking for some information. And every time we use the keyboard.

Do you only use the default keyboard? Or maybe you have been using one keyboard for a long time? Try something new. Fortunately, there are a huge number of them for Android.

There are ones that are very different from others even in their approach to typing. There are real bison in this area - Swype and. Swype, in my opinion, best keyboard for Android, which only can be.

Besides replacing your keyboard, home screen, and lock screen, you can try replacing your favorite apps with something new. For example, instead of the default music player, start using . In general, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of ways to change your smartphone. Which one to choose is up to you. We just set the direction. Who knows, maybe this article will save your budget from unnecessary expenses.

If the user knows well how to flash a phone, and if he is tired of official firmware, he can always create his own. This is very easy to do if you know the process algorithm, what is done and how.

How to make firmware for Android yourself

In order for the firmware to be of high quality and the phone not to turn into a brick, it is important to take a number of measures to prepare for the creation of an updated Android. You will need a computer with operating systemLinux, better than UBUNTU. It is advisable to install a 64-bit system for new versions of Android.

This bit depth is needed in order to change the firmware of Android versions above 2.4.

The hard drive must have up to 20 gigabytes free space. This is done in order to preserve the sources.

In addition to making it yourself from sources, there is a way to change a ready-made file.

Creation methods

To do Android firmware From the source code, it is recommended to take the following steps.

• Install UBUNTU. Only it will produce good firmware. You can download UBUNTU on the official website.
• Then prepare desktop and free up enough space, as described above. Then we move on to the assembly itself.
• Install Java program.
• You can download the sources from the 4pda forum.

The advantage of making your own firmware is that you can optimize your Android as much as you need. And you can also rid it of pre-installed programs that simply clog it and are not used. Another advantage is that you can flash the firmware yourself and update your phone to any version.

Of course, edit already finished assembly much easier for yourself. For this you will need:

• Install UBUNTU OS.
• Download andimgtool and rkwintools programs. They will help you decrypt boot.img, recovery.img, system.img data. and also pack them.
• Find clean firmware. The main thing is that the title contains the words ROM. We choose the download site at our discretion, for example desktoplinux.ru, or any other.

Making a phone firmware from a ready-made file is of course much easier and simpler. This is the advantage of editing ready-made firmware.

Instructions for making Android firmware yourself

Build Android firmware from sources

Before you start creating custom firmware with your own hands, it is recommended to install virtual machine, and it runs on Linux OS.

Now you need to find the firmware that you will modify. xda-developers.com – on this site you will find the firmware you need. The main thing is that they have the word ROM in their name and are clean. Then download it and unzip it using Winrar.

When you open the folder with the unzipped files, you will find the items listed below:

Launch android kitchen. Launch via Linux or through the Cygwin program. If you are running on Linux, then enter the command cd kitchen, then ./menu.

Now unpack the program. Then go to section 0 or advanced options. Having found commands to improve the version of Android, click on the one that is needed. Here you add your own animations, applications, and free up memory. After completing the steps, enter command 99. Now press build ROM front working folder. All that remains is to pick up the archive with output_ZIP.

Editing the finished version

Having studied the production of firmware from source files, we will now consider how to modify the finished file. To edit it, you need to download the file, look for the firmware with the name: Pure Android 3.0 ROM. This name indicates that she is pure.

After downloading the file, unzip it. The folders and files in it are components of the firmware. They are usually located like this:

• Meta— inf. Here is all the information about future system. Certificates, checksums and scripts are also found here.
• Boot. img. This is the image so you can download the firmware and install it.
• Folder system. This is Android without the kernel. Here are all the system settings and some of the installed utilities.

Then install software . You must go to the folder / system/ app/ and change the set of utilities. That is, you can destroy the folder with the utility that you do not need, or, conversely, install the necessary software. You can install utilities that the future Android system will need. To do this, they must already be unpacked. You just need to drag everything you need into this directory and these applications will be automatically pre-installed.

For graphics modifications it is recommended to refer to the folder framework/framework-res.apk. The user should unzip the element and insert two folders there: res/drawable-*, where he can upload his pictures and background with .png resolution. And res/layout-* - files with .xml resolution will be attached here. After the manipulations have been performed, you must collect everything again into one file.

Modify animation Or you can install a new one by unzipping the archive with the corresponding files. The user then modifies the files and packs them back.

If the user wants to improve the performance of his own smartphone, he must enter the following commands: ro.mot.buttonlight.timeout=0 – to illuminate the buttons after turning on the phone. debug.sf.nobootanimation=1 – disables animation when the phone boots. Many of them are located in the system/build.prop folder.

When all modifications are completed, you will need to archive them with the command $ cd ~/rom; zip -r my-rom.zip *.

Editing without using a computer

To edit the Android firmware without using a computer, the phone owner must download it in the archive. Launch Total Commander, this program can work with archived packages. Unzip the package.

• Download the Nandroid backup program from the website and make a backup copy.

There is another option - if the sewing is in zip format.

In this case, the procedure is identical. But before and after the process, you must first unpack and then pack the firmware file without compression. Using Nandroid backup, we make a backup and connect the device through any convenient application.