[soft_dev_person]

I did this on my Android as well, intentionally. My Galaxy S20 defaults to an animation speed that is just so horribly slow, everything feels sluggish. It also uses more battery.

I, too, was a bit confused at the frozen arrow in the beginning, until I realized it was just the loading indicator used when animations are disabled (they could probably improve that one). It is the one place where some sort of movement might still be appropriate.

Anyway, I recently disabled this feature due to it breaking the scroll behaviour in Play Store. Ironically the only app (I've noticed) that uses animation for scrolling in a way that makes this accessibility feature break it, making it a very jarring experience.

Instead, I went into developer tools and scaled all animations down to 0.5x. This at least makes all the annoying transitions bearable. I think this setting should also be exposed under accessibility settings.

[windexh8er]

Adjusting the animation scaling down is one of the first things I do on any Android phone I buy. I've also changed it for many friends and family who immediately ask how I've managed to make their phones "faster". Not a single person has ever asked me to turn it back. Yet this option is buried in "Developer Tools", so - yes agreed that the "Accessibility Settings" is a far better place. I do also wish it was adjustable in 10% steps all the way down to off. I think 0.3x is likely the sweet spot.

[bombela]

On a Google phone Android, turning off all animations doesn't replace it with a loading icon. It just makes the phone faster.

In Android 12 the Google Android launcher (the desktop, with the non removable Google assistant/search bar), doesn't obey turning off animation. I moved to the Nova launcher.

Like the parent post, every friends and family member I showed how to turn off animations was very pleased with the speedup. Nobody ever asked to turn it back on.