Android 16 could turn Wi-Fi and Bluetooth into one-click toggles once again

The entire reason that Android has a Quick Settings panel is to make it easy to quickly turn certain features on or off, but some features are easier than others to toggle through Quick Settings. For example, toggling your phone’s flashlight requires a single tap, whereas toggling its Wi-Fi or Bluetooth radio requires two taps. It wasn’t always this way, though, as older versions of Android only required a single tap for Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. Fortunately, next year’s Android 16 update could turn Wi-Fi and Bluetooth into one-click toggles once again.

One of the biggest changes in 2021’s Android 12 release was its redesigned Quick Settings panel, which swapped smaller toggles with larger, rounded, rectangular buttons. Although most of the tiles worked like before in that they were single-click toggles, the old Wi-Fi and mobile data tiles were replaced with a new “Internet” tile that always opened a panel when tapped. The toggles for Wi-Fi and mobile data were moved to this panel, making it two taps to toggle either radio.

Although the one-click nature of the Bluetooth tile wasn’t changed with the Android 12 release, it was eventually changed with the second quarterly platform release of Android 14 that Google rolled out earlier this year. In Android 14 QPR2, the Bluetooth tile was also reworked so that it would open up into a panel when tapped, making it two taps to toggle Bluetooth.

These changes, in my opinion, are for the better, since the Internet and Bluetooth panels make it easy to switch between networks or Bluetooth devices. However, these changes weren’t appreciated by some people who found it annoying that Google made it harder to turn off Wi-Fi, mobile data, and Bluetooth. These complaints were so fervent, in fact, that it made Google put out a blog post defending its decision to introduce the new Internet tile.

The company clearly had good intentions when making the Internet and Bluetooth panels, but it’s understandable that users who frequently toggle Wi-Fi, mobile data, and Bluetooth are annoyed by having an extra tap where they used to only need one. Android 16 may have found a solution that satisfies everyone, thankfully.

In recent weeks, we’ve been sharing our findings regarding Google’s efforts to overhaul the notifications and Quick Settings panels in Android 16. In our most recent post that documents how Google may let you resize Quick Settings tiles in Android 16, one of our astute readers noticed something that I had missed: the background of the Internet and Bluetooth tiles wasn’t fully filled in like all the rest. In fact, only a small portion around the icons was filled in, suggesting that tapping the icon would toggle the respective radio while tapping the rest of the tile would open the panel.

After this was brought to my attention, I immediately tested it and confirmed the Internet and Bluetooth tiles now worked this way. Tapping the icon for Internet toggled Wi-Fi, whereas tapping the icon for Bluetooth toggled Bluetooth. Meanwhile, tapping anywhere on the rest of the Internet or Bluetooth tile opened their respective panels. In hindsight, it should have been obvious to me that this would be the case, given that you’d expect the resized, 1×1 versions of the Internet and Bluetooth tiles to simply be toggles.

I think these changes are a great compromise, and I hope they make their way to Android 16 next year. They give us the best of both worlds: a one-click toggle and access to an expanded panel in a single tile. You still have to expand the Internet panel to toggle mobile data, but you can simply tap the airplane mode tile instead if you want to shut down mobile data. I doubt Google will split Wi-Fi and mobile data into their own respective Quick Settings toggles once again, so if you really want that, you can look into some third-party apps or use a phone from an OEM like Xiaomi where these toggles still exist.