The Samsung Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ are the first flagship smartphones from Samsung that ditch their traditional capacitive buttons in favor of software navigation keys. Besides allowing us to customize the layout of the keys, we can also change the navigation bar color as well. Among a selection of standard colors that we had to choose from, Samsung had also included a color wheel option so they could pick whatever color they wanted. However, the company removed this color wheel option in June’s OTA update, but thanks to an ADB command we can still manually change the Galaxy S8 navigation bar color.
The guild below walks you through how to change the color via ADB through a PC, but you can also do it through a terminal emulator application on the phone if you have root access.
Tutorial – Change Galaxy S8 Navigation Bar Color
- Grab the USB drivers for the Galaxy S8/S8+ (Google provides a list of some universal USB drivers here).
- Download the ADB binary for your specific operating system (Windows, Mac, Linux). These will always be the latest version.
- Extract the ZIP file into any folder on your PC.
- Open up the Settings application on your phone and tap on About Phone at the bottom.
- Locate and tap the Build Number option 7 times to enable Developer Mode.
- Then go to the Settings main menu and tap on Developer Options so you can enable USB Debugging Mode.
- Connect your phone to the PC and change it from “charge only” mode to “file transfer (MTP)” mode.
- Go back to the PC and browse to the directory where you extracted the ADB binary.
- Open up a Command Prompt or Terminal in your ADB directory. For Windows users, you can do this by holding Shift and Right-clicking an empty space in the folder. Then select the “open command prompt here” option. (Some Windows 10 users may see “command prompt” replaced with “PowerShell”.)
- Once you’re in the Command Prompt or Terminal window, execute the following command:
adb devices - This will start the ADB daemon if it hasn’t been launched already, and may take a few second to complete. If this is your first time running ADB, you will also see a prompt on your phone asking you to allow USB debugging from the computer. Allow USB Debugging access here.
- Now if you run the adb devices command from step 10 again, the command prompt or terminal will print the serial number of your device. If so, then you’re ready to move on. If not, then the USB drivers are likely not installed properly.
- Now, we want to execute the following command in the command prompt or terminal window:
adb shell
- Before we proceed though, we’ll need to get the color code that we want for our Galaxy S8 navigation bar color.
- You can go to this website here, and use the color picker shown at the bottom of the page.
- After you pick a color, copy the entire Android Value number shown in the box (include the – minus symbol if it’s there)
- Turn your attention back to the command prompt or terminal window and execute the following two commands:
settings put global navigationbar_color <insert Android color value> settings put global navigationbar_current_color <insert Android color value> - Then restart the Galaxy S8/S8+.
- You should see the new color in applications that don’t change the navigation bar to a specific color.
Explanation
Since Samsung hasn’t come out and given us a reason why they removed the color wheel from the Samsung Galaxy S8 navigation bar color options, we aren’t quite sure exactly why the company did this. It’s possible that Samsung simply doesn’t want people using strange colors as it can clash with the rest of the OS. Then again, there may have been some issue with how Samsung implemented this feature that is causing some issue with other parts of the platform.
Either way, the feature is still there under the hood of Samsung’s OEM skin, and thankfully we’re able to access it with some simple ADB commands. XDA Member haksancan first pointed this out in our Galaxy S8 forum and did a lot of work explaining where this feature is hidden and even how to calculate a specific color. The value format we’re using here is an RGB hex color code converted to signed decimal. There are ways to manually calculate the color value, but we’ll just be using the color wheel linked in Step 15 of the guide above.
It’s these values that would have been changed when manually selecting a color from the Settings menu, but instead we’re just injecting them into the software with an ADB shell command. As mentioned earlier, if you don’t want to do this from a computer, then you can execute these commands through a terminal emulator. This alternative method does require root access though, whereas the ADB method shown in the guide does not.
If you ever want to revert back to a traditional color, you can simply go into Settings -> Display -> Navigation Bar and then choose one of the standard colors that Samsung has made available. Remember, we’re just manually injecting a color code with these commands, so you can easily revert this change by selecting a different color here.
There are a few caveats with this method though, and they applied to Samsung’s solution as well. For example, some applications manually change the color of the navigation bar on its own. This cannot be overwritten with this method so those applications will have control of the Galaxy S8 navigation bar color themselves. A fully transparent Galaxy S8 navigation bar is not possible except for a few applications (such as the gallery or the overview page).
This is because applications do not generally draw under the Galaxy S8 navigation bar itself. So setting it to be transparent will just show a blank space since the application isn’t drawing itself under it. And lastly, setting it as fully transparent true black shows up as opaque white in most applications. The workaround here is to use colors which are almost black colors instead of true black.
See some color examples in our Galaxy S8 forum
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