Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google is testing another change for the Play Store’s new persistent navigation bar.
- It makes the bar disappear when you scroll down on the main feeds, search results, or app listings, and it reappears when you scroll back up.
- This new bottom bar behavior seems ready for rollout, and it could soon reach users with a future Play Store update.
Google seems to be testing yet another improvement for the Play Store‘s navigation bar. Just a few weeks ago, it rolled out an update that added a Search tab to the navigation bar and made the bar permanently visible on all screens, including app listings and developer pages. But it’s now testing a change that makes the navigation bar disappear when scrolling.
An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
Although Google hasn’t implemented this in the current Play Store release, we managed to enable it manually in version 42.6.22 of the app. As you can see in the following video, the five-button navigation bar is visible on all screens, including the main feeds, app listings, and search results. However, it disappears when you scroll down and reappears as soon as you start scrolling back up.
This makes the nav bar behavior consistent with the Gmail app, and we expect it to be the final piece of the Play Store’s navigation bar changes. It seems ready for rollout in the current release, so it shouldn’t be long before it starts showing up for users. We’ll update this post when it’s widely available.
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