Hide the gesture bar on One UI 6.1 with the help of NavStar and ADB

Summary

• Circle to Search, a new feature on the Galaxy S24 and Pixel 8 series, will have a ripple effect across Samsung’s recent flagships.
• To trigger Circle to Search using gesture navigation, you need to long-press the gesture indicator at the bottom of the screen.
• To accommodate this, One UI 6.1 removed the setting to hide the gesture indicator, but a workaround using NavStar and ADB can restore the nav bar-free look without breaking Circle to Search.

Samsung’s Galaxy S24 Unpacked event was all about AI, and one of the headlining features was Circle to Search, a quick way to get more information about certain things on your screen. The feature will be exclusive to the S24 and Pixel 8 series at the start, but it’s poised to have a ripple effect across Samsung’s entire line of recent flagships. In order to streamline the process of triggering Circle to Search, Samsung has removed a popular setting from One UI 6.1, which is coming to older phones that won’t see the new search feature initially. This understandably has some users in an uproar, but thankfully, a fix has already emerged.

If you’re using button navigation on your Galaxy, triggering Circle to Search is simple — just long-press your home button, and instead of Google Assistant popping up (which is now accessed by long-pressing the side key), you’ll be able to circle any element on your screen to learn more about it. But for those who use Android’s gesture navigation system, a new shortcut was created where you long-press the gesture indicator at the bottom of the screen to trigger Circle to Search.

To accommodate this new shortcut, One UI 6.1 has removed the setting that allowed you to hide the gesture indicator, at least on the Galaxy S24, and presumably on other devices receiving the update. Thankfully, BDTech on Twitter/X has shared a workaround that can be used to hide the gesture indicator again. Since the instructions span multiple tweets, we’ll include the full list below, edited for clarity.

Disabling the gesture bar with a computer

1. Download NavStar from the Galaxy Store and enable the Transparent hint option
2. Install ADB on your computer
3. Enable USB debugging on your phone and connect to your computer with a USB data cable
4. Open a command window on your computer, change directories to the ADB folder, then enter adb devices in the prompt to check the connection
5. Run this command: adb shell settings put global navigation_bar_gesture_hint 0
6. Lock and unlock your phone to see the changes
7. Keep NavStar installed

Disabling the gesture bar from your phone

This can also be accomplished without a computer by leveraging Android’s wireless debugging feature and an app called Shizuku. The steps for that process should be as follows:

1. Download NavStar from the Galaxy Store and enable the Transparent hint option
2. Set up Shizuku
3. Integrate Shizuku with a terminal app like Termux
4. Send this command in the terminal app: adb shell settings put global navigation_bar_gesture_hint 0
5. Lock and unlock your phone to see the changes
6. Keep NavStar installed

Funny enough, Circle to Search still works exactly the same even with the gesture bar disabled — just long-press the same area at the bottom of your screen to trigger the feature. And for older phones that receive the One UI 6.1 update without access to Circle to Search, the above steps should restore the nav bar-free look and functionality of One UI 6. All of this begs the question: was Circle to Search even worth the hassle?