Until a couple of years ago, Android smartphones relied on physical (read capacitive) navigation buttons (back, home, recent). Later on, most of the Android smartphones started coming with on-screen navigation buttons. Which ones are better is a topic of debate and a matter of personal choice. However, the on-screen buttons can sometimes be annoying, especially when you are playing games.
Most of the people choose Android because of the level of customization that this OS offers. You can do almost anything with your Android powered device. Well, wouldn’t it be great if you could customize that annoying navigation bar? Before you get confused, let us tell you that navigation bar is the one which houses the on-screen navigation buttons.
You can customize navigation bar if you get bored of looking at the same old look of it everyday. Wondering how to customize navigation bar on your Android device? Well, worry not, we show you how with this guide.
How to customize navigation bar on your device
Step 1: Download the Navbar app to customize navigation bar.
Step 2: Install and open the app. After you open the app, tap on ‘Let’s Do It‘ and then ‘Go To Accessibility Settings‘.
Step 3: In the Accessibility settings, tap on ‘Navbar apps‘. You will then see a toggle button. Tap on it to enable accessibility for the Navbar app. You will be then be asked for confirmation. Tap on ‘Ok‘ to confirm.
After you have tapped on ‘Ok’, go back to the app and tap on ‘Go To Finish Screen‘ and then ‘I Got It‘.
Well, that’s it. Now you can customize navigation bar as you like.
You can either change the color of the navigation bar to match the color of the app opened, or, you can fix it to one color which will appear everytime.
If you take a look at the image above, you can see that the color of navigation bar has changed according to the color theme of the app.
Like we said before, you can fix the color of the navigation bar to any one color. Just tap on the radio button provided below the ‘Static Color‘ option and then tap on the gear icon to change color settings to your liking.
You can also customize navigation bar to see battery level of your device. Just tap on the checkbox provided below the ‘Battery percentage‘ option. You can tap on the gear icon to adjust size, color and transparency. You won’t actually see the battery level in numbers though, you will see a bar layered over the navigation bar which will show the battery level.
You can also customize navigation bar to show images on it. Just tap on the checkbox provided below the ‘Image‘ option and then tap on the gear icon to select from saved images. You can also make use of custom images or upload the one from your gallery, however, you would have to pay for it.
While the customized navigation bar did work properly, there were times when it didn’t when we opened apps like Gmail and YouTube. Having said that, we love how the navigation bar now looks on our device.
We hope you will have fun while tinkering with the navigation bar. Do send us a snapshot of what you came up with. For more tutorials, visit our ‘How-To Guides‘ section.
Also read: How to change keyboard color based on the app you are using [Android Guide]
