Short answer: swipe down twice, tap the pencil icon, and drag the tiles you actually use into the first six positions. Then learn to long-press tiles — it opens the full settings page for that feature and saves three taps every time.
The edit screen most people never open
Swipe down twice from the top of the screen to expand the panel fully, then look for a pencil, a three-dot menu, or an "Edit" label depending on your manufacturer.
In the editor you can:
- Drag tiles in from the available list below
- Drag tiles out to remove them
- Reorder by dragging
Position matters more than people realise. A single swipe shows only the first row or two. Anything after about position six requires a second swipe, which means it is not a shortcut any more.
Long-press: the gesture that saves the most time
Long-pressing a quick settings tile opens the full Settings page for that feature rather than just toggling it.
| Long-press this | Goes to |
|---|---|
| Wi-Fi | Network list and saved networks |
| Bluetooth | Paired devices |
| Mobile data | Data usage and limits |
| Battery saver | Battery settings and usage breakdown |
| Do Not Disturb | Schedules and exceptions |
| Hotspot | Hotspot name and password |
This replaces the usual Settings → scroll → tap → scroll sequence with one gesture.
Tiles worth adding that are off by default
Most phones hide these in the available list:
- Screen recorder — built into Android 11 and later, buried by default
- Nearby Share / Quick Share — file transfer without a cable
- Data saver — useful when tethering or near a data cap
- Location accuracy — toggle high-accuracy mode without digging
- Colour inversion / Extra dim — genuinely useful at night, far dimmer than the normal minimum
- Wallet / payment — faster than unlocking and finding the app
- Focus mode — if you use Digital Wellbeing
- Cast — for quick screen mirroring
Reaching buried settings faster
Some screens are several levels deep and have no tile. Three ways around that:
Search. The magnifying glass at the top of Settings indexes every sub-page. Typing "refresh" gets you to the display refresh rate directly, wherever your manufacturer decided to hide it.
Settings shortcuts on the home screen. Long-press the home screen, add a widget, and look for the Settings shortcut widget. It lets you place a direct icon for a specific settings page.
A settings shortcut app. An easy settings app puts the common destinations — display, sound, storage, apps, developer options, battery — behind one icon, which matters most on skins that reorganise Settings heavily.
Manufacturer differences
This is the main reason generic Android advice fails:
| Skin | Panel behaviour |
|---|---|
| Pixel / stock | Two-swipe expansion, pencil icon to edit |
| Samsung One UI | Three-dot menu → Edit buttons; separate brightness bar control |
| Xiaomi HyperOS | Split notification and control centre panels; swipe from different screen edges |
| OnePlus OxygenOS | Close to stock, with extra tile pages |
If a step here does not match your phone, search your Settings for the feature name rather than hunting through menus.
Developer options: worth enabling, carefully
Settings → About phone → tap Build number seven times. Developer options then appears, usually under System.
The two genuinely useful things in there for an ordinary user:
- Animation scales. Set Window, Transition and Animator duration scale to 0.5×. The phone feels substantially faster because it is spending half as long on animations. This does not overclock anything or affect battery.
- Running services. A real view of what is using memory right now, which is more honest than most task-manager apps.
Leave the rest alone unless you know what a setting does. USB debugging in particular should stay off when you are not actively using it.
A caution on automation
Quick settings tiles are safe to rearrange freely — nothing there can break your phone. The same is not true of developer options and hidden engineering menus reached through dialler codes. Those can change radio settings and are not covered by any warranty conversation you want to have.
