Have you ever stumbled upon a cool boot animation on your friend’s smartphone and wanted it on your device? Well, if you’re not on Android, you will most probably be disappointed but if you’re using an Android device, changing the boot animation is a piece of cake. Android is the most flexible mobile operating system in the market with huge developers support. Tweaking your device to change various parts of your device is quite simple on Android.
Customizing your smartphone is the best way to keep it interesting. Some cool wallpapers, ringtones and boot animations will definitely keep your device unique from others. However, you have to choose the compatible boot animation for your device depending on the display resolution of your device. Sometimes pixel density of the device also matters and an incompatible file will usually look sluggish on your device. So, choose a boot animation that matches the screen resolution of your device.
Once you choose a compatible boot animation, you have to install it on your device. Since the boot animation file resides in the system partition of your device, you have to root your device to make changes to it. There are various methods to install custom boot animation on your device. We have outlined the 3 most used methods to change the boot animation on Android devices, choose the one that you feel comfortable with.
Install Custom Boot Animation on Android Devices
The three methods discussed below are highly practiced and proven safe to use. However, it’s always better to take a nandroid backup of the device (atleast backup your data) to make sure you can revert back in case of any misfortunes. So, without any further ado, let’s begin with the tutorial.
Method 1: Using Root File Manager (Recommended)
In this method, you’ll manually overwrite the bootanimation.zip file in the system partition and assign proper permissions to it. This is the most recommended method to change the boot animation on your device as it’s less prone to error. You need root permissions to use this method. Follow the below instructions carefully to install custom boot animation on your device.
Step-1 Download Root browser app from the Google Play Store and install it on your device.
Step-2 Download the bootanimation.zip compatible with your device and place it in your device’s storage.
Step-3 Open the root browser app and navigate to the /system/media location on your device.
Make a backup of the current boot animation on your device. To do this, just copy the bootanimation.zip file and paste it somewhere. Make sure you grant SuperSU permissions if prompted at any point.
Step-4 Now navigate to the location where you’ve placed the custom boot animation and copy it. Paste the custom boot animation in the /system/media folder and agree to overwrite the current file if prompted.
Step-5 Long press on the boot animation file and tap on the permissions option and change the permissions of the file to rw-r–r– (Check the below screenshot for reference)
Step-6 Now reboot your device to see the new boot animation on your device.
Method 2: Using Custom Recovery
Installing custom boot animation is very easy with this method but you need a flashable boot animation zip for this. Note that the normal bootanimation.zip is not flashable, you need to download a flashable zip which contains the boot animation in the /system/media directory. You can simply identify a flashable zip by the META-INF folder in the zip file. Here’s how to flash the zip file from the custom recovery.
Step-1 Place the flashable boot animation file on your device’s storage.
Step-2 Boot into recovery mode on your device using any 3rd party app or the hardware button combination.
Step-3 In the recovery menu, choose the Install option and navigate to the boot animation file using the inbuilt file manager in the recovery.
Step-4 From the file manager, choose the boot animation file and flash it.
Step-5 Reboot your device once the flashing process is completed.
Method 3: Using 3rd Party Apps
Using 3rd party apps to install boot animations is very easy but we don’t recommend it. Most of the users faced issues using these apps, so it’s better to prefer one of the above methods. If you still opt for this method, follow the below steps to install the boot animation.
Step-1 Download Boot animation app choice from the Google Play store.
Step-2 Open the app and grant root permission if prompted.
Step-3 Choose the Local tab to select the boot animation file from your SD card or internal storage. You can also select the Server tab to select the boot animations online.
Step-4 Navigate to the custom boot animation on your device and tap on it. Select the Install option to start downloading and installing the boot animation.
Step-5 Once the download is completed then the boot animation starts installing and once it’s done “Install complete” message will appear.
Step-6 Reboot your device to see the new boot animation on your device.
