If you swipe down from Android’s menu bar twice, you’ll get a nice panel of quick settings you can toggle with one tap. Want to hide some of these settings, move them around, or add new ones? You have a few choices.
Android 7.0 Nougat finally added the ability to customize this menu, though it was available in 6.0 Marshmallow from within a hidden menu called “System UI Tuner”. If you’re rooted, however, you can get even more options on any version of Android, Marshmallow or otherwise.
Nougat Users: Use the Built-In Customization
Customizing the Quick Settings area on Android phones has long been a tweak that custom ROMs and other root mods offer, but with Android 7.0 Nougat, it’s a baked-in feature. Google even released an API that allows developers to build third-party Quick Settings buttons.
First things first: go ahead and give the notification area a tug to pull show the top of the Quick Settings panel and notifications. Then, pull it down one more time to show the entire Quick Settings menu.
On the bottom-right corner, you should see an “Edit” button. Go ahead and tap that.
This will, unsurprisingly, open the Quick Settings Edit menu. Modifying this menu is super simple and intuitive: just long-press and drag icons to where you want them. The Quick Settings menu can be two pages long—you navigate through them by swiping—with nine icons on each. That’s a lot of buttons!
And that’s really where the power of the new customizable Quick Settings menu shows: you can add custom apps to the menu now. There are already a handful of options in the Play Store, including simple things like a weather tile and a much more robust, fully-customizable app called Custom Quick Settings.
To add one of these custom apps, go ahead and install it on your phone—we’ll be using Weather Quick Settings Tile for this tutorial.
With the app installed, go ahead and jump back into the Quick Settings Edit menu. A new option called “Weather Quick Tile” should be available. Just add that. Yeah, it’s really that simple.
This particular app won’t load anything at first—you’ll need to tap it and allow it access to the device’s location. Once that is done, tapping the icon will re-load the weather, and double-tapping will open Weather Quick Tile’s Settings.
That’s really just the beginning of what customizable Quick Settings will be able to do, but the meat and potatoes are definitely in place. The APIs are available for developers, and as Nougat becomes available on more devices, the selection of available Quick Settings shortcuts will likely also grow. Neat.
Non-Rooted Marshmallow Users: Enable System UI Tuner
If you’re running Android Marshmallow, you have a slightly less powerful version of this customization hidden behind a secret menu. To enable the System UI Tuner, pull down the notification shade at the top of your Android smartphone or tablet’s screen. Long-press the gear icon that appears between the battery indicator and your profile image.
After about five seconds of holding, it should begin to spin. A notification saying “Congrats! System UI Tuner has been added to Settings.”
This is a new settings screen that will appear in Android’s system-wide settings app. To access it, open the app drawer and tap the “Settings” app icon. Scroll down to the bottom of the screen. You’ll see a new “System UI Tuner” option appear under About phone or About tablet. Tap it to access the formerly hidden options.
Open the System UI Tuner screen and Google warns you that these options are “Fun for some but not for all.” As Google puts it, “these experimental features may change, break or disappear in future releases. Proceed with caution.” Tap “Got It” to continue.
In a sense, this is like the chrome://flags interface in Chrome–both on Android and on desktop platforms. While the Developer Options screen hides options intended for developers, the System UI Tuner screen hides options intended for Android power users and tweakers.
Tap the “Quick Settings” option to rearrange your Quick Settings tiles. Press and drag to rearrange, or drag to the trash can to remove tiles you don’t want to see. You can also click the “Add Tile” button to see if there are any unused tiles you want to include.
If you want to go back to the default layout, tap the menu button and chose “Reset”.
It isn’t quite as powerful as what you can do in Nougat (or with the root tweaks described below), but it’s not bad for a hidden built-in option.
Rooted Users on All Android Versions: Install Xposed and GravityBox for Even More Options
If you’re rooted, you can customize the Quick Settings menu even further using an app called GravityBox, which contains a ton of awesome system-level Android tweaks. You’ll need the Xposed Framework installed to do this, so check out our guide to Xposed if you haven’t already.
If you have Xposed all set up, open the Xposed Installer app and tap the Download button. Tap the search icon and search for “GravityBox”. You’ll want to download GravityBox for your version of Android, so be sure to select the right one (“GravityBox [MM]” for Marshmallow, “GravityBox [LP]” for Lollipop, and so on).
Swipe over to the “Versions” tab and download the latest version of GravityBox for your phone.
When finished, the module will be installed, but not activated. In the Xposed Installer, head to the Modules section (or just select the notification that appears in your notification dropdown). Check the box next to the GravityBox module, and reboot your phone.
After rebooting, open the new GravityBox app that appears in your app drawer. There are a lot of tweaks in here, and I highly recommend looking through them, but right now we want to customize the Quick Settings menu, so head to Statusbar Tweaks > QuickSettings Management. Tap the “Master Switch” item to turn on QuickSettings. You’ll need to reboot your phone again before continuing.
Once rebooted, return to GravityBox > Statusbar Tweaks > QuickSettings Management. The world is now your oyster. You can tap “Statusbar QuickSettings TIles” to select which tiles show up (using the checkboxes on the right), and in what order they appear (by tapping and dragging the sliders on the left). You can also tap the three dots for more options, like showing an item in the lock screen only, or putting it in “Dual Mode”. Dual Mode means it’s a togglable button with a menu below it for more settings. If it isn’t in Dual Mode, it’ll go to the settings page for that setting (like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or Cellular).
Head back to the main QuickSettings Management page and you can do even more. You can set tile-specific settings, like changing what options it toggles between for Ringer mode, or even adding app shortcuts to the Quick Settings panel.
You can also choose how many tiles appear per row, access the Quick Settings menu faster by pulling down from the edge, and more. Poke around these settings and you’ll find a bunch of cool tweaks you can apply.