Could Android 11 be restricting navigation bar customizing apps?

Android 11 is now in developer preview, not distributed yet to the general public, but we are already getting some reports on issues it might be presenting. Android Police has drawn our attention to a Reddit thread in which some users complain about Android 11’s incapability to run navigation bar modifying apps.

The apps in question either don’t start, force close or crash. Such apps have been used to customize Android’s navigation bar and gestures.

Apparently, in order for most of those apps to work correctly, they rely on a command called “wm overscan” on the backend. The overscan command hides the navigation bar, so an app can implement a new one.

However, some tech savvy users have tested the command, executing it on the Android Debug Bridge (a command-line interface that runs on a developer machine to execute a command on an Android device) on the new Android 11 and received an error message: “unknown command: overscan”.

Unfortunately, we still do not have any information whether this is a bug in the new Android 11 or whether it is an intentional restriction on Android’s customizability. Access to the reported bug on Google’s Issue Tracker is restricted at the moment.

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