In case you didn’t know, just as you can access the developer options on your Android phone or even Android Auto, you can also do it on your television. This will allow you to use advanced features such as USB debugging or even tinker with features such as device GPU rendering or background process throttling. For this reason, today we will teach you, step by step, how to access the Android TV developer options .
Before starting, let’s go with the important thing, the necessary and fundamental warning in these cases.
Use this tutorial only if you know what you’re doing . Tampering with developer options on any Android device can lead to bugs and issues of all sorts . This is made for the experts and unless you are one of them we do not recommend touching or accessing the developer options .
I say it seriously. In addition, each Android TV can be very different with what it offers or what it has inside, so what works well on some can be a disaster on others.
Why do you want to access the developer options of your Android TV
The truth is that for many things. If you are a real software developer, it can be used to create an error report (one of the options) and thus test and debug the failures of the application that you are programming for Android TV, for example.
Similarly, other developer options can influence the performance of the television .
For example, one of the features that appears when activating this advanced mode is to modify the window animation scale. By default, this is set to 1x, but reducing it to 0.5x can speed up Android TV a bit.
The same goes for other advanced features such as those we have named at the beginning of the GPU or background processes.
However, again, touching these options should only be for those who know what each one means and what they are doing.
Finally, in the developer options we can also influence how the television itself is viewed, through features such as being able to change the image color mode, for example.
How to access step by step
From the main screen of your Android TV, go to the “Settings” which is the gear icon.
In the menu that appears, scroll down to the “Device preferences” option and press the OK button on the remote.
Within the new menu, choose “Information” and press again to enter.
In the new menu, scroll down to the “Build” option . When you are with it selected, press the OK button 7 times to activate the developer options . It will warn you of the remaining touches until it is achieved.
Once done, the television will display the message that those developer options have been activated.
Now, if you go back to “Device Preferences”, you can see that a new menu called “Developer Options” has appeared.
If you click on it, a huge range of preferences will open up, subdivided into categories, allowing you to destroy your television in many new ways.
However, this not all.
The factory menu of the Android TV
If you look at the image above, an option called “Factory Menu” has appeared on my TV model. When you press it, it opens that blue menu on the left, where even more advanced options related to television and its operation appear.
Each model will be different and, again, getting in there is a mission for experts only. Be very careful because you will be touching delicate things.
What developer options does Android TV have
We make you the exhaustive list of the things that you can configure in those options.
In addition to the “Factory Menu” of the television, as soon as we enter the development section we will have the virtual switch to disconnect the developer options .
In addition, we can access:
- Create a bug report.
- Active screen. To prevent the TV from going to sleep.
- HCI Bluetooth lookup log. To capture Bluetooth packets to a file.
- Image color mode. To change it and adjust how colors look on TV.
Android TV Debugging Section
Here we can:
- Enable USB debugging.
- Revoke that authorization.
- Choose app to fake location.
- Turn inspection of view attributes on or off.
- Define the application to debug with which we work.
- Enable wait for debugging.
- Turn on USB app verification.
- Change the size of the logger buffer.
Networks section of Android TV developer options
In this section we find the following options:
- Activate wireless display certification.
- Enable verbose Wi-Fi logging.
- Always turn mobile data on/off (even when you have Wi-Fi, to switch networks quickly).
- Select the USB configuration (MTP, mass storage, etc).
- Enable/Disable when connected to Wi-Fi.
- Enable/Disable when connected to LAN.
Android TV Developer Options Input Section
Two options here:
- Show touches on the screen for better tracking in the application you work with or develop.
- Location of the pointer, to overlay the data of the screen presses.
Drawing section of Android TV Developer Options
Quite a few options in this section:
- surface changes.
- Show layout limits (video, margins, etc).
- Force layout direction to RTL (right to left).
- The window animation scale. Default to 1x.
- The animation transition scale, back to 1x.
- The duration scale of the animation. A 1x again as standard.
- Simulate secondary screens.
Hardware Accelerated Rendering Section
- Enable/Disable GPU acceleration.
- GPU updates.
- See hardware layer updates.
- Debug GPU overdrawings.
- Debug non-rectangular clipping operations.
- Force MSAA 4x.
- Disable hardware overlays.
- Simulate color space.
Multimedia section of Android TV developer options
- Enable/Disable USB audio routing.
Monitoring Section
- Enable/Disable Strict Mode.
- GPU rendering profile.
- Enable OpenGL tracking.
Applications section of the developer options
- Destroy app activities (when the user stops using them).
- Limit background processes.
- Show ANR in the background.
- Waiting applications.
- Force app permission externally.
- Force resizing activities.
As you can see, the list is huge and now you know how to activate those developer options on Android TV . Remember, with great power comes great responsibility. So if you don’t really know what you’re doing, don’t mess around with these menus.