PART 1 : General Tips & Tricks + Hidden/Less Known Features:

The Lockscreen:

1- Voice Search Shortcut

2- Lock state, icon changes depending on the lockscreen modes( Locked, Unlocked, Fngprnt., Face Dtc. etc ). If you are using Face Detection and the phone unlocks itself, you can hit the icon to lock it.

3- Default Camera app shortcut

4-Carrier

5- Status icons and profile

/6- Time,Date,Alarm,Name.

7- Notification zone, here will be shown your notifications, swipe down to expand each notification / show more notifications.

Slightly pull down a notification to only expand it ( keep holding )

Placing an icon on top of another creates a folder.

Not only you can use the search bar on the top to look for things on the internet, you can also look for content on your phone like Contacts, songs, apps. ( Feature needs to be enabled in Google Search app’s settings )

Long pressing the drawer icon takes your directly to the app searching screen.

Say OK Google to trigger a voice search action ( Feature needs to be enabled in Google search app’s settings)

Swipe from the left to access Google Now.

Using the scroll bar you can get an alphabet indicator.

Use the search apps bar to quickly find what you are looking for if you’re the “what’s uninstalling ?” guy.

You can enable app suggestions on Google search app’s settings to see your must apps on the first row.

You can swipe down from the status bar to see your notification.

Swipe down once again to get to the quick toggles panel.

Swipe down from the status bar with two fingers to quickly access the quick toggles panel.

Long press a notification to see from what app it’s coming from, tweak the notification setting ( if the app uses this API)

Tap on the “text” where the arrow is on the two first toggles ( Wi-Fi / Bluetooth ) to directly see what Wi-Fi networks/Bluetooth devices are beaming around.

Some toggles like Do not disturb and Carrier does have an expanded view where you can do some more settings without leaving the quick toggles panel.

Pressing the round profile icon on the top right corner shows your profiles.

Long press the settings shortcut to enable SystemUI Tuner.

Quick Settings : From here you can re-order your toggles or you can add more with a new broadcast feature and compatible apps like this one .

Status bar: allows you to pick which icon should/shouldn’t be shown in the status ( battery, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Casting etc )

Sebp: you guessed it.

Demo Mode: this a mode for developers to take clean status bar screenshots for the google play store screenshots ( it’s written in the guidelines that the status bar should be clean. IT HAS TO BE CLEAN. GUIDELINES SAID SO.)

Long press the settings gear shortcut again to remove it.

Go to Settings/About phone and hit the Build number line multiple times quickly to enable Developer Options.

Go To Settings/ Developer Options, scroll down to Windows Animation scale, Transition animation scale, animator duration scale and set everything to 0.5x to go even faster ( Tssshhhvv style)

Plug your device to your computer via USB, pull down the notification shade and hit “USB for XXX” notification, from here you can choose what to do with your connector, dope huh ?

If you got a device with USB-Type C you can do even more, for example if you have a Nexus 6P and your phone a 5X you can charge his phone with yours and vice versa.

You can your default USB Configuration mode by going into the previously enabled Developer Options/Select USB Configuration.

You can use your connector for :

Charging, MTP, PTP, RNDIS, Audio Source, MIDI…

Go to Settings/Apps and hit the setting gear icon on the top right side

App permissions allows your to manage permissions of every single app, but warning some apps are not built for this new feature and disabling some permissions can break the app.

App links allows you to manage the “Open by default” settings for example you can set choose to open or not the YouTube app everytime you open a url starting with youtube.com

Default apps allows you to pick your favorite Browser, Phone, SMS and Assit & Voice Input app.

Battery optimization allows you to set what app should be affected by DOZE.

for the rest, you guessed it.

Go to Settings/Developer Options/Running Services to see what apps are running and how much ram they are taking.

On previous Android version ( before M) this setting is under Settings/Apps/Running Tab

You can click on a desired app and hit Force close to terminate it, note that if you do that to apps like Whatsapp or Telegram you won’t receive any notification until you restart the app manually.

Go to Settings/Sound & Notification/Other Sounds to enable or disable some sounds like the dial pad tones, screen locking sounds etc

Go to Settings/App notifications to set what app can/can’t show notification and set prioritary ones plus allow peeking.

Go to Settings/Sound & Notifications/Do not disturb/ to create a do not distrub profile with automatic rules.

Go to Settings/Sound & notifications/When device is locked to show or hide notification on the zone 7 of the lockscreen.

Long press the power button, long press the Power Off option to get to SAFE MODE

Safe Mode boots the system without 3rd party apps ( useful in case you installed a junky app that made your phone got nuts)

You can also boot into Safe Mode by long pressing the Volume Up button when the phone is booting up.

To disable safe mode, simply reboot normally.

Go to Google Dialer/Menu(3Dots)/ from here you can enable or disable Google’s caller ID + Nearby Places

Google’s Caller ID shows you names of numbers you don’t have in your contacts.

Nearby Places shows you nearby places about what you are searching for in the dialer app.

In the Favorites view of the dialer, pressing the contact in favorites calls him directly, long pressing it allows you to reorder them, tapping the three dot menu button expands the contact card to show more details

Go to your favorite SMS app, in this case it’s Google Messenger, hit the three dot menu button go to settings then Advanced and enable SMS Delivery reports.

Now when you send an SMS you will see a checkmark ( similar to what you get on Telegram or Whatsapp) when your sms is delivered to the receiver.

Unfortunately it doesn’t tell you if it was read or not, it’s just when it’s has been delivered.

When you set an alarm, you can quickly access it from the quick toggles panel you will see it right next to the date on the upper left corner.

Long pressing the clock takes you directly to the Night Mode ( Similar to Daydream ).

Now when you set an alarm on the phone, it automatically takes it to your Android Wear devices so you get a pretty violent wakeup to put your a good morning mood :cough:

Hit one of the volume buttons to see the volume bar, from here you can adjust the volume, hit the bell icon to directly set the phone to vibrate mode or hit the arrow to get more audio control for alarms and media sounds.

When on vibrate mode, hitting the volume down button enables Do Not Disturb mode.

Speakings about buttons, you can press all your buttons (power + volume up + volume down) at once to make a bug report, your device will vibrate once and it will vibrate again when the report is done ( you get a notification so you can send it to your grandfathers, i’m sure they’ll know what to do ).

Android Lollipop introduced an awesome new API called Camera 2 API, this API allows you to control manually every setting of your camera, exposure, focus, iso, shutter speed etc in Photo mode & Video too, of course you need compatible apps like Manual Camera or L CAMERA

Google Voice Search can perfom some useful tasks even when you are offline.

Just Say OK Google(in enabled or hit the mic button ) Wake me up a 7AM, or Wake me up in two hours etc ( you have to try it there is a lot of combos) you can also say “ Send a whatsapp message to John Lennon, tell him mint stuff buddy “

You can also set reminders with advanced settings “ Ok Google, remind me to buy a fancy shirt when i’m at DuarteShop “

I can’t live without this features, it’s just so handy Oh and when you have OK Google enabled, once your phone is charging it’s always listening so you can trigger whatever you want without touching anything.

NOW ON TAP : Oh yeah my favorite Android 6 feature, when enabled now on tap can be triggered by long pressing the home button, it looks for everything that is displayed and shows a list of informations, could be a brand, place, people whatever … it’s just brilliant !

For example if you have a conversation where your friend is giving you rendez-vous, if you Now On Tap It it automatically shows you an option to create a calendar event ( auto filled with informations gathered from the conversation ).

You can customize the default apps for Google Search voice commands:

When you trigger an action for example “OK Google, Take a picture” the Google Search app will automatically launch the Google Camera app.

To change that, simply go back, hit the three dots menu button, select your favorite camera app and hit the check mark.

The next time you repeat this command your favorite app will launch.

You can of course set the default camera app on your phone but this allows you to, in my case keep the Google Camera app as my default one and get Manual Camera when I trigger it by voice.

You can change a lot of things too ( like your default browser etc ).

Lollipop & Marshmallow got a new feature called Tap & Go. I never tried it but i heard it works great here is a demo