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Currently my android google chrome new tab looks as follows,

enter image description here

It used to show twitter as well. I made the mistake of long pressing twitter icon and removing it. Since then I'm seeing times of India shortcut, as seen in the above image. I've visited twitter multiple times after that, but looks like chrome is brining it back. On desktop, I can use Edit shortcut and change the url. But how do I do similar thing in android?

Note: I'm on Android 10 (Oxygen OS v10.0.1). I don't have root access.

Abhishek
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1 Answers1

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If you have root access, open the file /data/data/com.android.chrome/app_chrome/Default/Top Sites in an Sqlite editor. In the table top_sites, you would find many columns. The relevant colums are url and rank. Rank starts from 0. Chrome for Android show only top 8 ranks as top sites on new tab page.

If your twitter row/entry is not there already, than add it and make sure to give it a rank between 0-7. Further make sure that no other row conflicts with your specified rank. At last, make sure you do all of this when Chrome is force-stopped using Settings app.

This, however, does not guarantee that the changes would persist for long. As you would interact with Twitter and other sites in the future, Chrome would tweak the ranks again per the interaction it analyses and processes.

Tested on Chrome for Android v76.0.3809.132.

Firelord
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  • By any chance do you know, how to do it for non-root device? Edited the post accordingly.

    Yes, I understand google can change the ranking, that is fine with me :)

     – Abhishek Nov 05 '19 at 18:42
  • No. A known way to tweak Chrome is to use its flags, but I don't see a relevant flag either, so I don't think non-rooted device users can do anything in here. – Firelord Nov 05 '19 at 20:53
  • Ok. Thanks. Looks like I'm stuck then :( – Abhishek Nov 06 '19 at 15:44
  • Regarding preventing Chrome's automatic rank tweaking, perhaps is it possible to freeze the database by making it read-only? Not sure if it may break any since I can't test it currently... – Andrew T. Sep 03 '23 at 09:03