Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The PERFECT Android setup for your relatives | Tech Support 101”.
Setting up devices for friends and family is a really stressful process, but fixing problems is even worse. So here’s a few of our tips to help to make Android topper, shooting that little bit easier, hi there, I’m taking over from Damian for a second explain to you. Why we’re doing this video see? I live over 3,000 km away from my parents and in-laws and I’m their only tech support. If you think that troubleshooting an Android phone is easy in person, try doing it remotely over a video call with pixelated video and a slow connection and your mom and dad slowly reading every single word of a popup or error message. Over the last few years, I’ve lived through horror stories of my mom, deleting every single photo she’s ever taken and asking me to fix it. My my aunt uninstalling WhatsApp and wondering where it went and my dad just somehow figuring out how to hard reset his phone. A couple of times and asking me to fix it, it’s not easy and that’s why every single time I upgrade their phones, I try to set them up in a way that is the most foolproof possible.
My goal is to avoid issues even occurring in the first place. Just so, I don’t have to waste my time fixing what could have been prevented from the beginning, so I’ve devis the system, basically a series of steps that I take in order to remove and uninstall the biggest troublemakers and make sure everything that they care about is Backed up and safe that way, even if they mess things up, I can always revert back and trust me. They always mess things up, but the system has worked for us and it has saved us a few times.
I was able to remotely restore my mom’s, my dad’s and my aunt’s phones on different occasions, obviously uh without them losing their data. I was also able to restore all the photos and videos that my aunt took of my grandma before she passed away. That kind of thing is priceless, so if you want to make owning a smartph phone, an enjoyable experience for you and for the people that you do tech support for, I do recommend that you check out these steps and follow them so I’ll leave it to Damian To take you through them, so the first thing that we recommend you do after setup is: go in and hide every single Quick Settings toggle that you don’t want your family members to touch especially do not disturb.
We know for a fact that they will find a way to trigger, do not disturb and when they shouldn’t do and then you’ll get told a month later, that their phone isn’t ringing anymore and that’s why they don’t take your calls. Q, utter Fury, we’d also suggest removing any unnecessary icons from the home screen. Uninstalled apps.
They don’t need and hide the icons of applications. They should never open if they have a Samsung phone with one UI home, create folders and dump everything super poess in there. If they have a pixel or close to Android 1 builds like Sony, experior or similar, try to put everything they need on the home screen, so they don’t have to open the app launcher at all to find apps.
If you super convince, your relatives can’t be trusted to not mess things up here, set up the home screen. First, then, get a third party launcher like Nova and replicate that setup exactly and use the lock layout option to ensure that nothing can be moved or dragged out position if the launcher does crash at least there’s a backup with a familiar home screen layout that your Friends and family will be able to decipher so if your family likes to follow the news and reading articles, but you can’t be with them 24/7 to save them from the junk of today’s web, all you can do is ensure that they avoid the worst of it. In the past, you may have inadvertently agreed to many popups, which results in a slew of notifications from random websites. This is just an extra headache and nefarious sites might be ready to pounce with scams. So it’s worth removing those risks in Chrome. I’D suggest that you go to settings site, settings, notifications and toggle the notifications option off this, doesn’t just stop all notifications from showing up.
It also stops websites from even asking them if they do want notifications or not, which is absolute perfection as far as we’re concerned. That’S not all as while you’re there, I suggest you go to settings, site settings and location and toggle that off and I’d probably do the same thing for the microphone and Camera. There’S literally no reason any website should use or need those permissions so better to stop them from popping up in the first place and relying on your parents, diligence to dismiss them every single time.
Google Maps photos on YouTube and the regular Google search app are some of the biggest notification offenders on Android and they’ll flood you with reminders to rate a place. Tell you about the new video release and every video release. After that ping, you with random urgent news items or create new photo memories every single day, sometimes multiple times a day for all of these applications. You don’t need the headache and neither do your parents or relatives Maps notifications might be worth keeping on, but we’d recommend disabling them here. Youtube and the Google apps notifications are worth disabling because they can choose when to open them and then see what’s happening in these apps anyway and photos notifications. You don’t really want these ever to be open, because you don’t want your family members to me to mess with Google photos and more on that in just a second. You probably notice the trend here, it’s better to stop the problem before it even occurs. Instead of trying to fix it later, so I’m sure you’ve had all heard complaints of photos going missing or family favorites accidentally getting deleted from phones.
It can really be heartbreaking, so make sure that everyone has Google photos backups enabled at the high quality tier on their devices, because that will actually avoid them eating up into their cloud storage. I can personally tell you from experience that you don’t want to lose those precious memories if your relative’s phone starts acting up without warning better, yet because parents will no doubt figure out a way to somehow delete things inadvertently, make sure to tell them to never open The Google photos app – all they need to know is that their all their photos are going to be backed up to the cloud, but they shouldn’t mess with the application on phones with Android skins that offer local Galler applications, think Samsung OnePlus xiaomi and the like tell Them to use that Gallery app instead and probably pin that to the home screen on pixels and other stock Android phones. We recommend installing Google’s gallery application. It’S free local requires few resources and categorizes photos.
Just like the big Google photos application now, no matter what they do locally, they shouldn’t end up deleting messing with their real photos cloud backup by using this proxy method. So since everyone uses WhatsApp in a lot of global regions, the app houses, a lot of important conversations, information, photos and videos making sure it’s backed up is going to be essential for you, as a result of that. So that’s one of the first things that we suggest you set up under their profiles so go to their profile, chats chat, backup and backup to Google Drive. This makes it all easier to recover when there, if something does happen or Whatsapp stops working. It’S also worth setting up full Android backups, but contacts are likely going to be the most important here as it can be frustrating if your family member loses the phone numbers of friends or relatives or even the plumber and car mechanic, and have to rebuild that database From scratch, this is found under the phone’s settings system, backup and the backup now option. So those previous five steps are what we’d consider the most essential measures that you can take to make a relative’s phone as foolproof and massae as possible, but still we think it’s wise to take a few extra precautionary steps, but these are not necessarily essential unless you Feel, like you need them, I would personally say make sure Google’s find my phone is enabled both to help you locate that person or help them locate their phone if they do lose, it go into the application and log in here often, I think it’s actually worthwhile Setting your email account as a main account here to keep track of devices.
If you’re able to do that, or you could even create a master account that everyone can access and manage safely. Also, I would say, teach your relatives how to take a screenshot and send it to you or someone else. If they do need help, that’s a really useful tool. It’S also worthwhile teaching them how to share their screen during a video call so that you can easily troubleshoot any other issues that arise. Not all video calling apps support this feature, but it does work in WhatsApp, Google meet Zoom, telegram, Skype and more and I’ll leave links down in the description to how to do those.
If you don’t already know how to do it make sure spam detection is enabl for calls and SMS or download an application that will offer this feature and I’ll leave a link in the description to our most recommended spam detection, calling on application down in the description Below and finally, in many cases with family members of a certain vintage pick, the loudest ringtone and font size that they can read and, of course, a language they can understand. It sounds silly, but it will mean that that person can use their phone effectively and I think overall that should cover you for touchwood any major problems that might face a non- techsavvy relative and ensure that their experience with their Android phone is pain. When it comes to your day-to-day life as well, let me know if you have any tips of your own down in the comments sections below it’s always really nice to get more useful advice thanks for watching, though, and I will catch you in the next one – .