In this tutorial, we let you know how to hide the onscreen navigation bar in Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ without root. If you thought that the onscreen navigation bar is a waste of screen real estate, then you can easily hide/unhide your Galaxy S8/S8+’s navigation bar without root. However, note that it requires some technical expertise, as you need to execute few adb shell commands to achieve it. If you are interested, read on to know how it is.
Samsung Galaxy S8/S8+ are a beautifully designed Android smartphone with edge display, thin bezels at top and bottom, rounded display corners, and more. To make the bezels thin, the physical home button and accompanying capacitive keys are replaced with on-screen navigation and a pressure sensitive home button built into the display.
The onscreen navigation keys are a waste of screen real estate and a cause for screen burn in AMOLED screen, though they are pretty cool and will not stop working like the physical keys. If you are looking for a way to hide navigation bar on Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ without root, here is how it is. You can always unhide the navigation bar.
Note: After hiding the nav bar and status bar, you can get the onscreen navigation bar at any time by simply swiping from the bottom or top of the screen.
This guide is assuming that you have knowledge on ADB commands. In addition, you should have ADB and Fastboot driver setup on your computer.
How to Hide/Unhide Navigation Bar in Galaxy S8/S8+ Without Root
1. Setup adb and fastboot driver on your computer (read here/here)
2. Enable USB Debugging on your phone by going to Setting >Developer Option (To enable Developer Options, go to About phone and tap the Build Number 7 times)
3. Connect your Galaxy S8/S8+ to your PC, go to the ADB installation folder or Platform tools folder, open a command window there and issue the below commands.
To hide navigation bar, issue below command:
adb shell settings put global policy_control immersive.navigation=*
To hide status bar, issue below command:
adb shell settings put global policy_control immersive.status=*
To hide status and nav bar, issue below command:
adb shell settings put global policy_control immersive.full=*
To unhide navigation bar and status bar, issue below command:
adb shell settings put global policy_control null*
Note that the above commands are originally for Nexus 6, but they should also work on Galaxy S8/S8+, as well as with all ROM versions. (Source – 1, 2)
