Basic Tutorials Android mobiles and smartphone screens go off when there is no activity. The amount of time before the screen goes off can be set easily. We can have the timer go off in like in 15 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 minute or longer. It all depends on how long we want the display to stay on when we aren't actively touching the device's screen. Shorter sleep time is good if you want to preserve the battery. Longer times are used when we're looking at something like a photo for longer periods. It should be noted that some apps like YouTube will automatically keep the screen on when videos are being watched. We can manually set it from the Android Settings.

Here are the steps to set the sleep timer for Android devices:
  • Go to Android Settings.
  • Tap on Display.
  • Tap on Sleep.
  • Pick the time-15 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 minute, 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes or 30 minutes.
Choose How Long Android Screen is On

Now, your Android device's screen will go off after the inactivity period that you set. Having longer inactivity periods are not recommended, Suppose, you set the number to 30 minutes, the screen will stay on for that long. It might eat up your battery if you forget to lock your screen and turn it off manually. Your phone might be in your pocket and the screen might be on while draining your battery. So, remember to switch back to 30 seconds or 1 minute (the popular options) after the 30-minute temporary set up.
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Apps The trends section in Twitter displays what is trending globally or in certain countries of the world. It is a powerful feature of this microblogging service. The trends actually reflect what is going on around the world. Popular hashtags and keywords appear on the trending page. While the Worldwide trends are the one we want to look at, sometimes, we might have to switch it to the trends of certain countries. We will want to see what is trending in the country that we live in or even see interesting outcomes of other countries on Twitter. For that, we have to switch from worldwide trends to local trends or country-specific trends in the Twitter app.

Here is how you switch between worldwide and country-specific trends in the Twitter application for smartphones:

  • Tap on the Search icon 🔍 in the bottom
  • Tap on Settings ⚙ on the top-right.
  • Turn of the Trends for you slider.
  • Tap on Trends location and choose Worldwide or a country of your choice.

Twitter Trends Location Settings


Now, the trending section in the search screen of the Twitter app will reflect the changes. The trends that will be displayed there will be the one that you chose before. You might have to refresh the page by dragging from the top to see the new trends.

The Trends for you slider in the same settings that we visited before. If it is on Twitter will personalize the trends and base them on the people you follow and your location. It won't allow you to manually choose a country.
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Apps Gmail is amazing. It helps us to reply to our emails easily by providing us two related features called Smart Compose and Smart Reply. It is because of this feature that the emails we open will have a useful reply text suggestion below the email. Also, when typing up the reply, Gmail will try to complete our sentences. It is a smart feature and makes our life that much easier. Typing on a mobile's keyboard isn't fun but with the help of prediction in keyboards and the smart applications like Gmail by Google, we can speed up the process. But not everyone will want the feature. Some will even find it annoying when the app is trying to guess your reply or your next words. Luckily, we can turn it off from the settings. We will show you how to disable predictive writing suggestions and suggested replies.

Here are the steps to disable (or enable) predictive writing suggestions in Gmail:
  • Tap on ☰ Menu > ⚙ Settings in the Gmail app.
  • Choose a Gmail account if there's multiple of those.
  • Scroll down to General, and uncheck (or check) Smart Compose and Smart Reply options.
Smart Compose and Reply in Gmail

Now, if you go back and try to reply to an email, the feature will be disabled if you unchecked them from the settings. You can enable it by going to the same location and checking them on.
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How To's The Gmail app for Android is very popular and since the huge adaptation of Android, billions of users have it installed on their phones. Most of us seem to have a Gmail address. A Google account is also required to activate an Android device and a Gmail account is a part of it. This emailing app has different options to display, sort and categorize all the emails in our inbox. One of those ways is to select an inbox type to control how read and unread messages are displayed. We can choose an inbox type (Default Inbox, Important first, Unread first, Starred first and Priority Inbox). For each of these inbox types, there may be additional options. Now, we will learn how to configure it.

Here are the detailed steps to configure the Gmail App for Android and select in Inbox Type:
  • Go to Menu ☰ (Top-left).
  • Scroll down to access ⚙ Settings.
  • Choose a Google account if you have multiple of those added.
  • Tap on Inbox type under Inbox.
  • Pick one-Default inbox, Important first, Unread first, Starred first, Priority Inbox.
Inbox Types in Gmail

Here are the descriptions for these inbox types.

Default Inbox- This inbox type seems to be the most popular one these days. It is the one where emails are grouped as primary, social and promotion. The primary category will have general conversations. Social will have notifications that you get from social media websites. The promotion category will list all the promotional emails that are sent to you usually by email lists. You will have to click on the Menu ☰ to access and switch between these three categories. Grouping in this way is a great method to avoid all the clutter in one single-paged inbox.

We can also choose the categories other than Primary, Social and Promotions. Just tap on Inbox categories option on the same page (Menu > Settings). You can pick two additional categories which are updates and forums. Updates are auto-generate updates like confirmations and receipts. Forums will have emails from online message boards. Activate them with a checkbox if you need these two additional categories. We can also include all the starred messages in the primary inbox so that we don't miss something important in the secondary lists. Also, below the inbox categories option, we can choose when notifications are displayed as the emails reach our inbox. We can choose between All, High priority only and none.

Important first- It is the second grouping option available for inbox messages. It will have two categories-Inbox and Important. Gmail will automatically show you the emails that it thinks are important. High priority emails that you haven't read or replied are on top of the list. For notifications, we can pick to get notified for All new emails, important section only and none. There are also additional notification settings. Like, if you tap on Manage notification on the same page (Menu > Settings), you can also override the do not disturb settings and get notified for priority emails. It is a very powerful feature and must be used carefully, as you do not want the notification to go off in certain places after setting the Do not disturb mode on.

Unread first- Now, this is my most favorite inbox type in Gmail. Display all the unread messages on top and everything else is below them. It is how emails were in the old days. It is not a bad way to sort as well that is if you do not receive a lot of promotional and social media updates in your inbox. If that is the case, use the Default Inbox type. The 'Unread first' inbox type will also have an Unread label in the Menu. That page will only display messages that haven't been opened.

For the notification part, we can choose to get notified for All emails, High priority only and none. There is also an option to notify for every message and to turn on and off label notifications.

Starred first- As the name suggests, this inbox type will display the starred messages first. So, if you are keeping track of a certain conversation, they will be given the highest priority. You can add a star to a message in two ways. Select a conversation and click on ⋮ and choose Add star or open a message and tap on the Star on the top right. Once starred, the conversations will have high priority. The notification settings are pretty much the same as before.

Priority inbox- The final inbox type available in Gmail as of now. It will have these categories - inbox, important and unread, and starred. The important and unread category will group all the emails that Gmail thinks are important. Machine learning and the content of the emails are used to analyze which emails are important. The notification settings are pretty much the same except the fact that the default selection will notify you once for inbox important section messages.
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How To's When it comes to delivering ads to you on your Android phone, smartphone apps seem to be very smart. After you search for a certain thing like "web hosting", all you get are web hosting ads. Again, this process repeats when you add a certain television to a cart in a website and now, you get television ads along with web hosting advertisements. It tells us that online advertisement companies are building your interest profile. Over time, they have concrete information built under your name. It is quite useful for ad publishers as they can now target us by our interests. But for users, it can be a little intimidating and sometimes frustrating. We cannot avoid ads altogether when we browse the internet. However, we can control to a certain limit, what is displayed to us if we're using an Android phone or tablet.

Opting out of ads personalization in Android makes it possible for us users to avoid certain kind of repetitive ads. We might have searched for or looked at something online and now, we are no longer interested in it. We'd rather not have the ads follow us around with this particular thing. Also sometimes, we get the same advertisements over and over again. The goal is to avoid it. The fact is that interest-based ads are more relevant to us but sometimes it gets uninteresting. Instead of being displayed random ads, we would rather prefer to see ads that we are interested in. But at times, we just have to opt-out of ads personalization. It is very much possible in your Android phone.

Here are the easy steps that you need to follow to opt-out of ads personalization on Android:
  • Go to Android Settings.
  • Scroll down and tap on Google.
  • Tap on Ads under services.
  • Enable the Opt out of Ads personalisation slider.
  • Confirm your action.
Opt out of Ads Personalisation

Now, you will still get advertisements but they will not be based on your interests.
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How To's Most of the Android phones are configured to set the time on the device automatically. The Android smartphone is smart enough to figure out your location for the time zone. It can then automatically set your clock in the phone. It is a feature that most won't even modify. But some people might want to set this to manual time zone and date & time. This gives the user the ability to set a different time than where they are situated. Users can just disable automatic date & time setting or the automatic time zone selection done by Android.

To access the time zone settings in Android, follow these steps:
  • Go to Android System Settings.
  • Click on System.
  • Tap on Date & time.
  • Tap on the slider and put it on the left to disable-Automatic date & time, and Automatic time zone.
Date and Time Android Settings

Once the Automatic date & time option is disabled, the two options below will be accessible. One will allow us to set the date and the other will allow us to set the time. Similarly, when the Automatic time zone option is disabled, the select time zone option will activate allowing us to set the time zone manually.
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How To's Android has a couple of inbuilt gestures. They might differ from one device to another. Some phones might not support a certain gesture due to hardware limitations. But the gestures are there in the settings depending on the Android hardware. Using them requires no special or additional app. Depending on your phone gestures such as pressing the power button twice will open up the camera, and lifting the phone will wake it up. This tutorial relates to enabling and disabling the system Android gestures.

Here are the steps to enable (and disable) Android Gestures:
  • Go to Android System Settings.
  • Scroll down and tap on System.
  • Tap on Gestures.
  • Enable or disable each individual gestures by tapping on them and activating the slider.
Android Gestures


As you can see, the gestures on the screenshot are:

Swipe fingerprint or notification- Swiping down on the fingerprint reader will bring up the notification.
Jump on camera- Pressing the power button twice will bring up the camera. Works even on the lock screen for some phone.
Flip camera- Double twist when the rear camera is on to bring up the selfie or front camera.
Lift on check phone- When a locked phone is lifted, time, notifications and some basic information is displayed.

Note that the gestures might be different or unavailable in certain phones.
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How To's There are talks on how the new version of Android will now have a dark mode. The apps for Android also have started introducing their own dark versions and it can be enabled from the options somewhere. However, the older phones with the not so latest Android version will miss out on this feature. It should be noted that these phones might have a color inversion feature which inverts the color for every app as well as anything that appears on the screen. We can confirm that the color inversion feature is there in the system options of our phone with just Android 8.1.0. This tutorial will teach you how to turn it on.

To enable (or disable) color inversion in Android:
  • Go to the main Android Settings (from the menu or notification bar).
  • Tap on Accessibility.
  • Scroll to the bottom and enable the Colour inversion slider.
Color Inversion in Android

The screen will immediately invert all the colors. All the light, bright and white screen will now be dimmer. It is supposed to be good for your eyes and the battery. However, some areas might appear fudgy. The wallpaper that is set will also be inverted in color so it might look like one of those old photo negatives. The menu might not look so great as it is transparent and will display the faded wallpaper in the back. All the app icons will also be different The screen might flash a bit when switching between items and apps. But some people might find this color inversion feature useful. It should be noted that it is an experimental feature.
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How To's If you have an Android device (smartphone or tablet), it is highly likely that you are using Google Keyboard or Gboard as the default on-screen keyboard for it. With Gboard, text-suggestions are made in a strip above all the keys. The strip will have spelling suggestions and it will also try to predict the next word. The strip there is a powerful tool for quicker typing. Some people will find great use of the words that are predicted by the keyboard app. Others will find it annoying and will want it gone. Well, most people won't mind it up there. The system keyboard options give us the control to disable or enable the suggestions strip over the google keyboard.

Google Keyboard with Suggestions Strip

Here are the steps to enable (or disable) the suggestion strip and its underlying predictive and corrective features in Google Keyboard (Gboard):
  • Go to Android Settings by pressing ⚙ (the gear icon) after dragging the notification slider twice.
  • Tap on System.
  • Tap on Languages & input.
  • Tap on Virtual Keyboard.
  • Tap on Gboard.
  • Finally, tap on text correction.
  • To enable the option, make sure the sliders are to the right for Show suggestion strip, Next-word suggestions, and Auto-correction.
  • To disable the suggestions, the sliders for Show suggestion strip, Next-word suggestions, and Auto-correction should be on the left.
Text Correction Options in Google Keyboard
The suggestion strip will likely be enabled by default for most uses. Some might accidentally disable it and these steps will help those people turn it on. It is a very useful feature for typing fast in all the apps. Various other options are available for the keyboard at the same settings. A few notable ones are enabling emoji suggestions, suggest contacts, personalization, auto-capitalization, auto space after punctuation, double-space after full stop and spell check to mark mistyped words.
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