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sadiqkarur
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Now, the following section may not seem like a huge deal due to the fact that there are numerous applications on the Play Store that promise to change your navigation bar without root. And they do not work, many users report that these apps are buggy in certain apps like Chrome, when playing full screen video, or some games. Furthermore, many of these apps require you to enable an Accessibility Service to monitor apps to know when to re-color the nav bar, which may reduce performance. Finally, if you rely on these apps for too long, then you may be suddenly surprised to see them stop working when Android O rolls out because the next Android version is killing the ability of these apps to draw on top of System UI elements.
The method that we are using is based on Google’s implementation of the nav bar tuner, so it has none of these issues. However, there is one issue currently that we want to be upfront about: if you choose to follow this method to modify your home button, then the long-press home button action will no longer work meaning you can’t quickly access Google Assistant from the home button anymore. If you’re okay with that, then here’s how to change the icons on the nav bar.
The first thing you will need to do is download the icons that you want to replace your default nav bar keys’ icons with. I’ll be providing download links for you to grab the Google Pixel nav bar icons, but it’s up to you to find your own icons if you want anything else. You’ll need the icons in the PNG format, and as for the size, you can determine the size of the icons you need by looking up your device’s display density metrics on Material.io and correlating that with an icon size reference chart.
Credits for the extracting these Google Pixel nav bar icons goes to XDA Senior Member dariomrk. Download this archive if you have a 1920x1080p display and this one if you have a 2560x1440p display. Extract the contents of either zip file into a folder called “NavIcons” on the root directory of your storage.
Once you have the icons in the appropriate place, enter the following ADB shell command (warning, it’s a long one):
What this command does is replace back, home, and recent keys with KeyEvents that do the same function. In particular, back is replaced with KEYCODE_BACK, home is replaced with KEYCODE_HOME, and recent is replaced with KEYCODE_APP_SWITCH. These key codes perform the exact same function, but because we are using KeyEvents, we can specify what icon we want to use for them. In this case, we are pointing towards the back.png, home.png, and recents.png that we saved in /NavIcons.
However, by replacing the stock keys with KeyEvents, we lose the long-press home ability because currently there is no way to recognize long-press events of simulated key inputs.
I realize that right now, this method might not seem ideal or easy to implement, but at the time of this writing the Custom Navigation Bar app has not been updated to support adding your own icons. For now, my method (which is exactly how that app works, and when the app does get updated, it will face the same limitation) is how you can get whatever custom icons you want on your nav bar.
The method that we are using is based on Google’s implementation of the nav bar tuner, so it has none of these issues. However, there is one issue currently that we want to be upfront about: if you choose to follow this method to modify your home button, then the long-press home button action will no longer work meaning you can’t quickly access Google Assistant from the home button anymore. If you’re okay with that, then here’s how to change the icons on the nav bar.
The first thing you will need to do is download the icons that you want to replace your default nav bar keys’ icons with. I’ll be providing download links for you to grab the Google Pixel nav bar icons, but it’s up to you to find your own icons if you want anything else. You’ll need the icons in the PNG format, and as for the size, you can determine the size of the icons you need by looking up your device’s display density metrics on Material.io and correlating that with an icon size reference chart.
Credits for the extracting these Google Pixel nav bar icons goes to XDA Senior Member dariomrk. Download this archive if you have a 1920x1080p display and this one if you have a 2560x1440p display. Extract the contents of either zip file into a folder called “NavIcons” on the root directory of your storage.
Once you have the icons in the appropriate place, enter the following ADB shell command (warning, it’s a long one):
Code:
adb shell settings put secure sysui_nav_bar "space,key(4:file:///storage/emulated/0/NavIcons/back.png);key(3:file:///storage/emulated/0/NavIcons/home.png);key(187:file:///storage/emulated/0/NavIcons/recents.png),space"However, by replacing the stock keys with KeyEvents, we lose the long-press home ability because currently there is no way to recognize long-press events of simulated key inputs.
I realize that right now, this method might not seem ideal or easy to implement, but at the time of this writing the Custom Navigation Bar app has not been updated to support adding your own icons. For now, my method (which is exactly how that app works, and when the app does get updated, it will face the same limitation) is how you can get whatever custom icons you want on your nav bar.
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