That headline might sound like an internet ad that you don’t want to click on, but hear me out. If you feel your iPhone is acting a little sluggish, there’s a new trick surfaced by 9to5Mac that will make every action feel a little snappier.
Unlike other seemingly built-in iPhone tricks we’ve highlighted, this one seems to exploit an actual glitch in the latest operating system software: If you’re running iOS 9, you can completely disable the app loading animations and speed up how quickly every app opens. It’s tricky to do, but once it works, it feels like finally entering the Konami code on a video game correctly for the first time:
Here are the steps:
- Go into Settings > General > Accessibility > Assistive Touch, and turn on Assistive Touch.
- Tap the home button and drag the little white square that appears to the bottom-right corner of the screen.
- This is the hard part: Swipe down on the home screen to bring up Spotlight search, and in the instant that the little white square moves up to sit on top of the keyboard, tap the screen to exit Spotlight mode.
- If you timed it right, there shouldn’t be any animations next time you open an app. If there is, go back to step 3 and keep trying. (It took some of us several attempts—around 25 in a row—to get it to work.)
If it works, every app should snap right open on your phone—no more wasting split seconds waiting for things to slowly unveil themselves. And if you ever want your animations back, just turn your phone completely off and on again, and it should return to normal.
Quartz reached out to Apple to ask why this glitch exists, and why we’re not given the option to simply disable app animations—which you can do on computer operating system OS X—but haven’t heard back yet.