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For years, one of the best little personal touches on Chrome for desktop has been the ability to ditch the stark white or dark gray background on the New Tab Page and replace it with custom artwork, landscape photos, or personal images. Meanwhile, Chrome on mobile remained decidedly utility-first and fixed in its aesthetic.
Just today, the option to set custom wallpapers, themes, and color accents directly inside Chrome for Android showed up on my Galaxy Z Fold 5, and it brings a desktop vibe to the Chrome browser on a phone that I really like.
Setting a fresh custom background instantly makes opening a new tab feel vastly more inviting, and on a larger foldable display in particular, having that extra splash of color and personality gives the browser a much more polished, desktop-like feel that I’m going to stick with moving forward.
How to set a custom background in Chrome for Android
If you want to dress up your own mobile start page, setting it up only takes a couple of taps:
- Open Chrome on your Android device and navigate to your main homepage/New Tab Page.
- Tap the pencil icon in the bottom right corner.
- Select Appearance from the menu.
From the new Appearance menu, you’ll find several ways to tailor the look:
- Upload an image: Opens your system file picker so you can select any personal photo or downloaded wallpaper from your storage.
- Theme Collections: Browse curated Google photo galleries across categories like Landscapes, Architecture, Earth, Patterns, Illustrations, and Gradients.
- Chrome Colors: Choose from nine tri-color palette presets to tint the UI accents.
Rollout details
This feature initially launched on Chrome for iOS earlier this spring, but it is now rolling out widely to Android users via a server-side update tied to Chrome 150.
If you open the customization menu and don’t see the new “Appearance” options yet, try force-stopping Chrome to encourage the server-side toggle to kick in. It’s a subtle tweak, but if you spend half your day jumping between tabs on your phone, making your browser homepage a little prettier is a very welcome upgrade.
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