Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Revealing Developer Options on Android Jelly Bean

Oh, fer Pete's sake. Upgrade your Android device and now can't find the menu item Developer options? It's an Easter egg in Android 4.2.2 (Jelly Bean). From the home screen: Settings -> About device -> Build number and (srsly) click on Build number seven times. The Developer option menu item suddenly appears.

A big Thank You to http://gs4.wonderhowto.com/how-to/enable-hidden-developer-options-your-samsung-galaxy-s4-0146687/ .

Update (2014-05-15)

The original article I cited was specific to the Samsung Galaxy S4, but its technique worked on my Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7.0. I now believe this behavior is universal to Jelly Bean and independent of the vendor. I've tweaked this article to reflect that.

Update (2014-05-19)

I had unrelated reasons to revisit the Android page on hardware devices and indeed this is clearly documented there (and probably elsewhere) for devices using Android 4.2 or newer.

1 comment:

Paul Moorman said...

Happy to note that on my HTC One M8 running Android 4.4.2 that the repetitive tapping is no longer needed. You just need to slide the Developer option from Off to On. I just did that and changed from using the Dalvik to ART runtime. So far (15 minutes worth) everything appears to be running fine.