Google Chrome is learning to use more of your phone’s screen

Android has long allowed apps to utilize your phone’s entire screen by rendering content underneath the status and navigation bars. However, many apps did not take advantage of this capability. Google introduced a change with Android 15 that forced apps to go edge-to-edge, prompting developers to update their apps to conform with the full-screen layout. While some apps have already been updated to use your phone’s entire screen, Chrome is just getting around to it.

Google has announced that it has started testing an updated version of Chrome for Android that draws content “up to the bottom device edge by extending the viewport into the gesture navigation bar area.” As shown in the following illustration, it extends Chrome’s UI right to the bottom edge of the screen, displaying content behind the navigation bar.

Google is rolling out the edge-to-edge layout with Chrome 135 for Android, but it’s only available for a small subset of users at the moment. The company says that with this new layout, Chrome’s bottom bar will automatically move out of the way when users scroll on a web page and display more content behind the navigation bar. The change shouldn’t impact how developers design their mobile web pages, but the company says that in some cases, “content might get obscured by the gesture navigation bar.”

At the moment, Google is implementing Chrome’s edge-to-edge layout on small-screen devices. It notes, “Chrome on Android running on large-screen devices is currently excluded, and will be tackled in a future Chrome release.”