Yo how’d our hommie sideofburritos get old school quick access on GrapheneOS? Is this just an old version? The video’s only a year old! So I’m on GOS Android 13 (aka big dumb quick access button purgatory), totally confused and totally jealous. I can only imagine an out of touch board testing a new android version and telling the developers to make the buttons bigger and dumber while they tell their managers “okay, we can do that” while they die a little inside. This is the most egregious design offense committed in the history of AOSP.
Please tell me this can be fixed with System UI Tuner or some other bullshit that doesn’t kill my battery life or privacy.
I don’t really see why people prefer the old toggles, but I don’t think you can get the old buttons back in normal Android. You’ll have to write a patch yourself and apply it to the GrapheneOS branch, or you can try accomplishing the same thing with a Magisk overlay.
There are a few mods that can add more and smaller toggles if you want.
If you don’t want these two apps and can be bothered to compile your own ROM (long live open source!) you can edit
packages/SystemUI/res/values/config.xmland updatequick_qs_panel_max_tilesandquick_qs_panel_max_rowsto quickly make the tiles smaller.I tried Shizuku and was able to get it to work with Better Internet Tiles, which allowed me to split out the Data and WiFi tiles. When I tried Fabricate Overlay, it kept crashing when I went to save the overlay.
How do you edit the config.xml file that you suggested? Does that require root?
Editing the config value requires either the apps you already mentioned, which try to patch the values at runtime, or downloading the Android source code for a ROM for your device, editing these values, and then compiling the code. You can’t edit the files on disk without breaking everything, even with root, because these files are signed and won’t work if you alter the without signing them again; singing these files again requires the secret build keys that the ROM maintainers have, and those keys don’t get shared.
It’ll take a beefy computer with fast storage and fast internet an hour or so to do that, but it may require some command line tricks and XML file modifications specific to your device to make it work. With prior software dev experience, setting up a build configuration took me about 2-3 hours, about 100GB of SSD storage, over 24GB of RAM and all CPU cores active during the compile phase. You’ll also need access to some version of Linux (WSL2 should work fine if you’re on Windows, though there’s some overhead because of AV software and file system boundaries).
Compiling your own ROM certainly requires some dedication, and you’ll have to repeat the compile process once or twice a month to keep your phone updated. There are guides out there you can follow, but it’s a lot of Linux command line work with warnings and error messages written for developers to understand, not for the general user.
n the other hand you have absolute control over your phone, because except for a few binary blobs and closed source drivers, you can modify any line of code or configuration you like. Want to swap out an icon? Change the name of a built-in app? Change the system font to Comic Sans? You can, you just need to right files to modify!
Installing a ROM you’ve compiled yourself isn’t very different from installing an “official” custom ROM. Like with any custom ROM, you’ll need to unlock your bootloader, maybe run a few commands. Flashing the ROM is the easiest part of the whole process.