How to restore missing ‘Mobile Data’ and ‘Mobile Hotspot’ quick settings menu icons on Samsung Galaxy mobile devices

Recently, I have updated my Samsung Galaxy S7 to Android 7.0 Nougat and realized that I am missing both ‘Mobile Data’ and ‘Mobile Hotspot’ quick settings menu icons/toggles. For some reason, Samsung has decided to disable adding them into the menu. The following post shows you how to add them back using Android platform tools and ADB.

Just to illustrate, this is a screenshot from my Samsung Galaxy S7 device. As you can see, nowhere in the yellow highlighted area I see options for ‘Mobile Data’ or ‘Mobile Hotspot’:

So let’s add these missing icons back.

 

Requirements

  • Windows/Linux/Mac computer
  • Latest Android Platform Tools (download links supplied below)
  • Enabled USB debugging on your Samsung Galaxy Mobile Device
  • USB Cable

 

Instructions

First of all, we’ll need to install the ADB binary on your computer, Windows/Linux or Mac, use one of the links to download the platform tools.

ADB Installation

Download the appropriate version for your PC

Unzip the file you’ve downloaded onto your computer.

On my Windows computer, this is what it looked like once I unzipped the downloaded file (platform-tools-latest-windows.zip):

 

Enable Developer Tools (and USB debugging)

To enable USB Debugging on the Samsung Galaxy is done through Developer Tools, which are by default disabled on Android devices. Enabling it requires somewhat of a trick, here I explain the steps:

  1. On your Samsung Device, go to “Settings“.
  2. Select “About phone“.
  3. Here is the tricky part, find the “Build number” and tap it seven (7) times until message appears saying: “Developer mode has been enabled“.
  4. Now go back to “Settings“ and select a newly added option: “Developer options”.
  5. Under “Developer options“, turn on the toggle for “Developer options” so it’s switched to “On“.
  6. Slide the check the “USB debugging” to “On”.

 

Connect Phone to your PC

Connect your Samsung phone to PC using USB cable. You’ll get a notification, asking if you wan to allow developer access to your device, enable it.

 

Use ADB to restore missing ‘Mobile Data’ and ‘Mobile Hotspot’ quick settings menu toggles

 

Following instructions are for Windows PC:

  • Open command prompt on windows by using CMD command (I usually open it as administrator)

  • Once the command prompt is open, navigate to a folder where you unzipped android platform tools. In my case in C:\platform-tools

  • Then use the command: ‘adb devices‘, it’ll show the number of your Samsung device

  • Then use the command: “adb shell‘ to get into command shell where we can pass setting commands:

  • Important: Once done, let’s make a backup of all currently used toggles on your device, by using ‘settings get secure sysui_qs_tiles‘ command. This is what it looks like on my PC:

  • Copy the entire result of the command to your notepad.
  • Execute a new command ‘settings put secure sysui_qs_tiles “NOTEPADLIST,MobileData,Hotspot”  (make sure to replace red highlighted NOTEPADLIST, with the whole output of  ‘settings get secure sysui_qs_tiles‘ command that you earlier copied into Notepad.
  • Once the new command is executed, Samsung quick access menu will add both missing ‘Mobile Data’ and ‘Mobile Hotspot’ quick settings menu toggles:

 

I hope this helped. Enjoy!