How to customize your navbar on Android

With every new version of Android, the bottom navbar morphs slightly, with changes to the three icons or tweaks to the background visibility values. But if you want to give it a bit more visual pop or add new features there are lots of free tools to change its shape or color and add extra functions like a battery status or display of audio equalizer bars. And best of all, you don’t need to be a root user or mess with annoying tutorials to use them.

To make these dreams reality, we turn to two free Android apps. The most important one is Navbar Apps, which lets you tweak the look of the bar as desired – or at least everything related to the background, as the shape of the buttons can’t be changed. You can set the background to vary depending on the app being run, like with notifications, or change to a specific color depending on which app you go into. And if the flat colors aren’t to your taste you can also check out the app’s own background images library. Who hasn’t dreamed of having a Nyan Cat permanently hanging out at the bottom of their screen? Er, wait, maybe that’s just me.

Another cool feature on the app is that you can use the bottom bar to show how much battery you have left on your device. There’s also a feature that’s still unimplemented to display equalizer bars when you listen to music. But you don’t have to wait for it, as the MUVIZ Nav Bar Audio Visualizer app has already got that base covered.

This app adds a display of equalizer bars over the navbar or on top of it, and also allowing you to customize its shape, color, or transparency, or make it disappear when you open certain apps. That said, for other apps that already have their own equalizers, like Spotify, they disappear.