Install Xposed Framework

KitKats? Toast? Sorry if that headline made you hungry, but no I'm not talking about Nestlé's chocolatey wafer treat, nor the crunchy slices of bread you have with your eggs in the morning. If you haven't caught on by now, Android names each major release after some sort of c ...more

If you're a self-described multitasker, Samsung has a feature that's perfect for you called Multi-Window, which lets you display two apps on your Galaxy S4's screen simultaneously. You can browse the day's news while doing a sudoku, take notes while watching a YouTube video, ...more

Here's one of those modding must-haves that's basic, yet easy enough to forget about. If you're going to install apps that don't live in the Google Play Store, like the Google Experience Launcher, the OnePlus One lock screen, or something that needs root privileges like the Xp ...more

Many Android games use large, storage-heavy OBB files to store supplemental data. Generally, games with high-end graphics download these extra files when you install them from the Google Play Store. Most OBB files take up more than a gigabyte of space on your internal storage ...more

Let's say you're watching a video and everything's going great, but you feel the need to raise the volume a tiny bit. You hit the volume button on your Nexus 5, and all of a sudden, a giant volume slider appears that obscures half of your video for 3 seconds. I know it's happ ...more

When it comes to theming your Android device, it's the little touches that count the most. That's why developer SArnab created the Android Theme Engine, an Xposed Module to theme those hard-to-reach corners of the Android System that often go untouched with other themes. So, ...more

According to a study done by Kaspersky, 7.6% of Android users root their phones. That may not sound like a lot, but with over 2 billion Android devices out there, the math works out to over 150 million rooted phones — more than the total population of Russia, Mexico, or Japan ...more

Facial, voice, and hand gestures are the way of the future for controlling our devices, and even gaming consoles like the Xbox One have incorporated them. Unfortunately, our Nexus 7 tablets have not. We're currently limited to using soft keys for most actions, but we can inch ...more

The new Google Now Launcher has hotword detection and one-swipe access to Google Now, but personally, it's not enough to convert me away from other launchers like Apex or Nova. Just because it's Google's official launcher for stock Android doesn't make it better than all the r ...more

One of the coolest features of the Galaxy S5 is its IP67 certification. This means that the S5 is internally impenetrable to dust and can be submerged in water for thirty minutes at a depth of one meter. It's definitely a handy feature for folks who've lost a phone to a toilet ...more

Most times when you take your smartphone out of your bag, pocket, or purse, you probably know exactly what you're going to do with it. Make a call, send a text, take a selfie, browse viral videos on YouTube, or one of the other many things a smartphone can do nowadays. But fi ...more

The Google Now Launcher that was introduced with the Nexus 5 seems to have a lot of folks torn. On the one hand, having a home screen page dedicated to Google Now, as well as the always-listening voice search, are killer features. On the other hand, its lack of customization o ...more

Just because you have a Mac doesn't mean you can't root your Nexus 7 tablet. In fact, rooting Android 4.4 KitKat on both the 2013 and original 2012 N7 models is easy, if not easier than rooting it using a Windows PC. After rooting, you can enjoy many of tomorrow's features to ...more

When you misplace your Android device, finding it with the Android Device Manager, or even better, Whistle Me, can help you find it no problem. But what about when your phone is not just hiding under the couch cushions? Your worst nightmare just came true. It's officially gone ...more

It just keeps getting harder to enjoy all of the benefits of root without sacrificing features. Thanks to SafetyNet, we've lost the ability to use Android Pay, Pokémon GO, and even Snapchat to an extent. But the most recent news on this front is perhaps worst of all: Netflix h ...more

When theming Android, it's the little touches that complete the look, making your device yours. If you're rooted, you probably know by now that there's virtually nothing you can't change the look of on Android. The Xposed Framework allows modules to easily hook into system-le ...more

While Snapchat's latest update brought messaging and video chatting, it also ruined something for us softModders—KeepChat. With KeepChat, we were able to save pictures and videos sent to us without the other person being notified. It was pretty slick, and I was beginning to mi ...more

In an attempt to keep things simple, Snapchat has a limited amount of editing features, made up of "smart" photo filters, drawing pens, and special text captions. If you want more editing capabilities, you'll be pleased to know there's a way, no thanks to Snapchat, but you wil ...more

Some of my favorites hacks are the ones that speed up the process of accessing my favorite and most-used apps. So, in this softModder guide, I'll be showing you a super fast way to open those apps straight from your Samsung Galaxy Note 3's lock screen. In order to bypass the ...more

While ads certainly pay the bills (thank you guys, we love you), they can also be obtrusive and annoying when it comes to accessing and viewing content (not our advertisers though, they rule). YouTube, which is fist-full of advertisements, rakes in billions of dollars a year ...more

Since the introduction of LED flash to smartphones, there have been hundreds of flashlight apps flooding Google Play, since most Android phones do not have built-in flashlight apps, including the HTC One. Third-party flashlights are great for lighting up dark corners, but som ...more

The official Google Hangouts app has been around for a while, and is the standard messaging app on Nexus devices, but Google didn't make each version equal. On the iOS version, you get the feature of adding "stickers"—GIF emoticons—but Google left that out of the Android versi ...more

For some reason, when you're typing in landscape mode, Android extends the text input field to cover every bit of the screen that the keyboard's not occupying. This gets pretty annoying sometimes, especially with messaging apps where you might need to reference what the other ...more

Oddly enough, stock Android does not come with a "do not disturb" function out of the box. Samsung has their own version built into to TouchWiz called "Blocking Mode," and Apple has had their "Do Not Disturb" feature since iOS 6, so why is stock Android so late to the game? N ...more

There is only one time every year where I will willingly watch advertisements—during the Super Bowl. Maybe a Victoria's Secret commercial every now and then, too, but that's about it. So, when I'm on YouTube trying to watch a two-year-old skateboard, the last thing I want to ...more

By default, Android limits your call history to the last 500 incoming, outgoing, or missed calls. When you reach this limit, older entries get trimmed off the bottom of the list and deleted forever. This isn't an issue with storage space, because even the biggest call logs onl ...more

Jotting down notes is something we all do, and with the convenience of Google Keep, it is easier than ever to have them synced across all your devices. The only downside is that they can become a huge cluster of duplicates and uselessness after a while. You could always delet ...more

S Health is one of the biggest selling points for newer Samsung Galaxy devices. It offers a centralized place to view and manage data collected by all of the various sensors like the heart rate monitor. As wonderful as this service is, all of its features are not available in ...more

I know where I bought my phone, and I definitely know who I'm paying money to every month for cellular service, so there's absolutely no need to see my carrier's name draped all over my device. Fortunately, with Android Lollipop, the carrier label is only present on the lock s ...more

The basic clock app on Android devices is functional and has a few nice features. One of these is a "World Clock" view, which lets you see the current time in different cities across the world, and shows the time in your location at the top. But of course, the local time in y ...more

As smartphones become increasingly integral parts of our lives, so does data throttling. Personally, I try to save data any way that I can, so to stave off unnecessary usage, I use the GoogleOfflineVoice to limit the amount of data consumed by voice typing. With this Xposed m ...more

Not every mod you add to your Android will revolutionize the way you use it, but many of them can make things a little more simple and convenient for you on a regular basis, like sliding across the status bar to adjust brightness or swiping the screen to put your display to sl ...more

While the legality of recording phone conversations varies from state to state, it's still a sought-after feature for most people. How else are we going to shame all of those bad Comcast customer service reps? Since it's a legal gray area, HTC and other smartphone manufacturer ...more

Like most of you, I find myself scrolling through endless lists of Facebook feeds, Instagram lists, and tweets. Most of the time, it's a pain to scroll all the way back up to the top. Unlike iOS devices, Android has never had a solution to quickly scrolling to the top of a lis ...more

While having a ton of friends on Snapchat does wonders to stroke my ego, sending content to all of them at once becomes a hassle when I have to go one by one, checking each contact individually. Snapchat has yet to implement a 'select all' option on the contacts list, so here ...more

Chrome's text selection interface is pretty nice, but it could definitely use some improvements. For instance, when you're in Incognito Mode, you can't perform a web search for words you've highlighted. And when you're typing out a forum post or using any text input field, for ...more

Yes, they're called volume keys, but they can do much more than adjust your volume. With minimal effort, you can do some amazing things with these physical buttons, like secretly record videos, toggle on your flashlight, scroll through pages, control your music, and much more. ...more

When I first used the Google Now Launcher, I appreciated the transparency that came with it, and how it made the real look larger than it did before. But now that I'm used to it, that transparent navigation bar is beginning to look a little stale. To spruce things up, I'll be ...more

Almost every Android device comes with a Google search bar embedded directly into its stock home screen app. But Google search is available in so many different places on Android that having this bar in your launcher is almost overkill. On top of that, Google recently changed ...more

While we wait for our chance to get our hands on Android Lollipop, Google has already released Material Design updates to most of their apps. I love the new direction of the updated UI, but something just seemed to be lacking in tying everything together. That was the case un ...more

WhatsApp recently updated their emojis (or emoji, depending on your preference), but it wasn't exactly a welcome change. Many users have complained that the new smilies are just way too big, others aren't too fond of the shinier appearance, and countless folks have been ventin ...more

For any multitude of reasons, some apps require you to be connected to Wi-Fi in order to function properly. This could be because they would rather you have a stable connection to enjoy their content, or that they don't want users complaining about the amount of data being guz ...more

These days, using the power button to lock your Android seems a little old-fashioned. Thanks to third-party apps and mods, you could seamlessly lock your device using a double-tap, a swipe, and even gravity, or you could just throw it in your pocket, all of which help prevent ...more

One of the easiest ways to adjust brightness on an Android device is to use the slider found in the notification shade. Unfortunately, for some odd reason, the Sprint variant of the LG G3 does not have this feature. Searching extensively through the Settings, I found nothing ...more

YouTube makes money hand over fist every year selling ad space to companies, but unless you're reaping those benefits, they can be pretty annoying. Luckily, there is a simple way to get rid them on your rooted HTC One with Xposed and YouTube AdAway. YouTube AdAway is an Xpose ...more

Much like the high volume warning, there are various minute features on Android that users either hate or just find annoying. Thankfully, there are developers out there that sympathize. It may seem frivolous, but one feature that a lot of people want eliminated is the screen w ...more

Everyone has that one friend who just can't help but send multiple texts in rapid-fire succession, when they just as easily could have been consolidated into one easy-to-read message. Alert after alert, this becomes extremely annoying as your phone shoots notification sounds a ...more

Much like the Pen Window feature in Air Command, Multi Window is extremely useful in its functionality, but bogged down by serious restrictions. While you can open and use two apps at the same time, you're limited to only a handful of apps that can utilize the feature, leaving ...more

Your Note 3 is a magnificently large phone. So much so that it has a handful of built-in options that make it easier to use with one hand, collectively called "One-handed operation." While these settings are helpful, they have to be manually enabled and disabled whenever you'r ...more

Windows 8 may have introduced a new, intuitive touch-based interface, but plenty of Microsoft loyalists were unhappy with the absence of the classic start menu that they were so accustomed to. Although you'll have to wait until Windows 10 to get this feature back, you can hav ...more

Straight out of the box, the Nexus 5 is an awesome device, but even it can be faster with better battery life. Luckily, one of the things that makes it so awesome is that there are tons of developers creating mods for it, since it runs stock Android by default. When it comes t ...more

When Apple released their plus-sized iPhone 6 and 6 Plus models, it only made sense that they would include a one-handed feature to accommodate the larger displays. That particular feature is called Reachability, and with just a quick double-tap of the Home button, the screen ...more

For new Android users, rooting an Android phone can often be an intimidating process, especially since there are so many different ways to gain root access, depending on your model and firmware version. I've previously covered a way of doing it for the AT&T version of the Sam ...more

Whether if it's to play games or watch Netflix or YouTube, children love using our smartphones and tablets. As an uncle of many, I don't mind my nieces and nephews using my gear, but I do mind them opening apps they have no business being in, like my photo gallery or messaging ...more

One of the Note 3's best features is Multi Window mode, which allows users to display more than one app on the screen at the same time, taking advantage of the large and high-resolution display. When the Galaxy Note 4 was released earlier this year, it improved on the Multi W ...more

The Air Command window on Samsung Galaxy Note devices makes it easy to access all of the features that the S Pen has to offer, such as Action Memo, which turns your handwritten notes into actionable links, and Pen Window, where you can draw a square on the screen to open a cer ...more

Battery life is extremely unpredictable on an Android. Finding the right ROM and kernel combo can make or break having the kind of battery that will last you all day long. Even if you do find the perfect pair, you then have to worry about apps, widgets, and other processes con ...more

Android's main UI is looking so good these days that you hardly ever see developers spend time creating themes anymore. But even with the beauty of Material Design working in our favor now, there's always room for improvement, right? Recently, developer Thunder07 created an X ...more

Whether you use a third-party keyboard or the stock offering, your Samsung device keeps a history of the last 20 words you copied on its clipboard. Samsung added this feature to Android to help make multitasking a bit easier, but if you use a password manager like LastPass, th ...more

When it comes to passwords, the longer and more complex they are, the better the security. Even professional hackers say so. But if you've ever tried to type in such a password, you've surely noticed that it can be a bit of a pain. Mistype one character, and you're probably go ...more