How To Disable the Developer Options Menu for Android

Android’s built-in developer options contain settings that shouldn’t be enabled by the average user. Despite what the title of each setting might appear to do, none of these will increase performance or improve the Android experience. Developer options are named such because it is essentially a toolkit made available for people that write apps. Aside from the USB debugging feature, there is little that the majority of people will ever find useful. Enabling some of the settings found here can even render a phone unusable and may require a factory reset before it can be fully accessed again.

The menu normally isn’t even visible because in some of the latest versions of Android Google rightfully hid the menu from plain sight.  We talked about how to enable the Developer Options menu in Android before when turning on USB debugging. But if USB debugging is no longer needed, it might be a good idea to disable the Developer Options menu and prevent a user from accidentally accessing them. I recently installed a custom ROM on an Android phone a friend who isn’t very tech-savvy, and I am quite certain that he would go snooping through these settings and break his phone, so it was a simple step to just disable them and prevent disaster.

Ready to hide the Developer Options menu? I am, let’s do it.

Disable Developer Options on Android

We need to get into Settings > Manage Apps. The easiest way to do this on most Android devices is to press the menu button while on the Homescreen and then tap the Manage Apps option. We can also browse to this by launching the Settings app form the drawer and then tapping the Apps option within.

Now within Apps setting menu, scroll sideways to the All panel and then browser downwards until the Settings app is visible. Tap that app.

In settings tap the Clear data option and any confirmation window that appears. That is all!

Note: On Android devices running Cyanogenmod the Developer Options panel will disappear simply by disabling it within the menu itself.

Now the Developer Options menu is gone from sight. It won’t appear in the settings menu again until it is re-enabled manually from the “About phone” screen.