How to Remove Auto-Added Toggles from Quick Settings in Android 5.0 Lollipop

Android 5.0 Lollipop quick settings is smart in a way that it automatically adds toggles to quick settings in notification bar for things that you use on your device. However, not everyone prefers to have their quick settings toggles changing automatically. Also, if I enable hotspot for some reason, it doesn’t mean I always need it in the quick settings. So how to remove these gifted toggles from your quick settings?

Well, turns out, Android 5.0 Lollipop has an in-built solution to this. And thanks to reddit user eak125 for discovering it for us that if any toggle that was added automatically to the quick settings, then it’ll automatically be removed from there if unused for 30 days. The user figured it out by manually adjusting the date and time on his device to 31 days forward and Bam! the toggles that were added to quick settings removed by themselves. However, getting back on the current day and time gets the toggles back. But thanks to another user Stark_Tony who pointed that setting date to 31 days backward, then using the toggles you want to be removed and then setting the date back to current date and time removes the toggles from the quick settings.

So, that’s one way of removing the toggles that are added automatically to your quick settings. But adjusting the date and time manually isn’t the desired solution to this, so for the developer folks among who knows and keep ADB on their computer develop/play with stuff on Android devices have a more straightforward way to remove the unused toggles, and that’s a single line of adb command fired to your device:

adb shell pm clear com.android.systemui

What the above command does is it basically clears the data of SystemUI app, that’s responsible for many user interface stuff including the wallpaper on your device. After executing the above command a reboot is required. And along with the auto-added quick settings toggles it’ll also clear wallpaper on your device.

If you’re rooted, you could do this straight from your Android device as well. Just get any app manager that takes advantage of root permissions on the device and clear the data of SystemUI app. One popular app for doing such stuff is Titanium Backup, but I’m sure there’ll be plenty more available on the Play store.

So those were the few tricks to remove the auto-added toggles in quick settings under your notification bar. We hope Google comes up with an easier solution to this, in-built into Android. Or some some dev takes this into his own hands and releases a simple app to better manage quick setting toggles in Android 5.0 Lollipop.

TL;DR

Here are a few tricks to remove auto-added toggles in quick settings like Hotspot, Invert Colors, etc. from your device:

1. Set Date & Time 31 days backward, tap the toggles you want to remove, and then switch back to current date and time. Your quick setting toggles will be back to normal.
2. Clear SystemUI app data, this can be done in two ways:
   • From ADB: adb shell pm clear com.android.systemui
   • [ROOT] Using Titanium backup: Clear app data for SystemUI

That’s all.

via Reddit