How to Hide the Navigation Bar in EMUI 5.0 [No Root]

What was once considered a niche category is now practically the mainstream, as bigger screen phones continue to storm the smartphone market.

Huawei’s latest flagship smartphone, the Huawei Mate 9, features a large 6.0″ screen that would naturally make it more difficult to use the phone one-handed if it wasn’t thanks to Huawei’s ingenious implementation of a one-handed mode.

But while Huawei makes it easy to shrink the screen to easily reach all UI elements, they don’t provide a way to do the opposite. Some users would prefer being able to take advantage of more screen real estate on the Mate 9’s beautiful 6.0″ screen, and Huawei even seemingly obliges by offering a „floating dock“ feature which contains all of the standard navigation keys. Unfortunately, they don’t provide a native way to hide the navigation bar when this floating dock is activated.

If you are familiar with build.prop edits, you might have seen suggestions to add qemu.hw.mainkeys=1 to your build.prop in order to hide only the navigation bar. It’s a fairly old trick, but it requires you to have root access to implement. Even if you do have root access, there’s currently a bug in EMUI 5.0 that causes you to boot to a black screen if you add this line to your build.prop.

But there’s a simple trick you can use to hide only the navigation bar on EMUI 5.0, and best of all it doesn’t require a build.prop edit (meaning it works without root). This way, you can still have the status bar shown but use any other navigation method you prefer (such as Huawei’s floating dock).

All you need to implement this trick is a computer with the ADB binaries and the proper drivers for your Huawei device (download HiSuite for easy installation of drivers). Once you’ve set up ADB (and have enabled USB Debugging in Developer Options), then simply enter this command:

adb shell settings put global navigationbar_is_min 1

Reboot, and your phone’s navigation bar will be completely hidden. Without a navigation bar, you’ll want to use a third-party application or Huawei’s floating dock to actually use your phone now.

Since this is not immersive mode (we’ll make a tutorial on how to use immersive mode without root at a later time), the navigation bar will stay hidden until you reverse this command. If you wish to reverse this command, simply undo it by entering the following:

adb shell settings put global navigationbar_is_min 0

We hope you enjoy this nifty trick for your unrooted Huawei device! If we come across any more tricks like this, we’ll be sure to quickly let our readers know.

Source: www.xda-developers.com