Recently I bought a new Android smartphone for my niece from Amazon. Although it is nothing comparable to Samsung Galaxy series of smartphones, this phone is both powerful and affordable. But it had a problem – there was no option to change the homepage in the stock Android browser. The homepage was set to the manufacturer’s site and the option to set homepage was missing in the settings (perhaps intentionally done by the manufacturer). I searched Google to find out that this is not uncommon in cheaper Android smartphones to force the homepage on the consumers. But I did not give up and soon found a workaround to change the homepage in the stock Android web browser.
If you also want to change the homepage in the Android browser but are not able to do so because there is no setting to change the homepage, then you can follow these simple instructions:
- Open the Android web browser and visit a website in it that you want to set as the homepage. You should be online to do this. Then press the menu key (the left key at the bottom edge of your smartphone) and select Save to Bookmarks from the menu that appears.
- This will show a screen with options to save the bookmark. Leave everything as it is in the options. Make sure you are saving the bookmark to the Local account and saving it to the Bookmarks group. Then you can tap OK to save the bookmark.
- Once again, press the menu key in Android. This time you have to open the bookmarks gallery by choosing Bookmarks/History from the menu that shows up.
- Find the local bookmark that you had saved earlier and long-tap on it. A menu will appear and you have to select Set as homepage from this menu. A notification message will be shown indicating that homepage has been successfully updated.
Even if the homepage settings are not available in the settings section of the stock Android web browser, you can easily save any website as the bookmark and choose that bookmark as the homepage. It takes only a few seconds and you can quickly get rid of the homepage that your manufacturer has set for you.