The Super Mario Galaxy Movie opens today. I’ve been watching fans catalog hidden references in the trailers for months. Your Android phone has its own famous easter egg, and it’s been there for over a decade.

Quick answer: Android Developer Options animation scale is a set of three sliders — Window animation scale, Transition animation scale, and Animator duration scale — that control how fast or slow your phone’s transitions play. To access them: open Settings, tap About phone, tap Build number seven times to unlock Developer options, then go to Settings → System → Developer options → Drawing and set each slider to 0.5x or Off. The controls are hidden behind an easter egg originally meant for app developers.

What’s happening

If you’ve ever turned on Remove animations in Accessibility and found it too stark — everything snapping with no transition at all — you were looking for something in between. Faster, not gone. Android can do that. The controls are just hidden behind a literal easter egg.

How to unlock it

  1. Open Settings
  2. Tap About phone
  3. Find Build number
  4. Tap it seven times

You’ll see a countdown: “You are now 3 steps away from being a developer.” Then a toast message confirms you’ve unlocked Developer options.

The settings inside

  1. Go back to Settings
  2. Tap System
  3. Tap Developer options
  4. Scroll to the Drawing section
  5. Set each of these to 0.5x or Off:
    • Window animation scale
    • Transition animation scale
    • Animator duration scale

Three separate sliders. Window controls how windows open and close. Transition controls how you move between screens. Animator controls everything else: loading spinners, expanding menus, progress bars.

Setting them to 0.5x makes your phone feel noticeably faster without removing motion entirely. Setting them to Off is more aggressive than the Accessibility toggle.

Why you’ve never seen it

Google designed the 7-tap unlock for developers who need to test their apps at different animation speeds. But the controls inside are useful for anyone sensitive to motion, or anyone who just wants their phone to feel snappier.

The irony: the most granular animation controls on Android are behind a hidden menu that most people will never find.

The bigger picture

You have two options. The Accessibility toggle is all-or-nothing. Developer Options gives you a dial. Most people don’t know about either one. Android’s display settings are scattered the same way — Adaptive Brightness is in one menu, animation scale is in another, and neither one tells you about the other. That’s why we built TrueTo. One place for the settings that actually help.

Happy April Fools’. This one’s real.