Google Docs finally rectifies a longstanding design glitch

Google Docs is one of the top utility apps, and also among the several Google apps that have been supercharged with multiple AI capabilities. But as we all know, no app is perfect. Docs for Android has a glaring design glitch that meshes the device’s status bar icons with some of the app’s elements. Thankfully, Google has remedied this issue with the latest version of the app, currently available on the Play Store.

Frequent users of the Docs app on Android will notice the search bar on the app’s home page firmly stuck to the top of the screen while scrolling through the list of documents. While this is not uncommon behavior and something that other apps offer, the search bar, account switcher, and other elements appear below the status bar icons in this scenario, resulting in a rather unpleasant viewing experience. This is visible more prominently with the system’s dark theme enabled, so if you’ve used Docs with the light theme the entire time, you’re less likely to notice the disparity.

To make things worse, this bug meant that a standard notification would hide the app’s search bar from view. Moreover, some users may even find that their search bar is partially cut off. But that’s changing.

The status bar gets a minor facelift

Transparent vs solid status bar

As 9to5Google’s reporting reveals, Google is fixing this by giving the status bar a darker background, thereby hiding the app’s search bar and other elements from view. This is an effective solution to a problem that has been around for some time.

The updated status bar behavior is landing with Google Docs version 1.25.252.00.90. If the update isn’t available in your region yet, you can grab the APK for this version of Google Docs from reliable sources, such as APKMirror.

Google Sheets also carries the same glitch

While a similar UI inconsistency is also present in Google Sheets, it hasn’t seen an update just yet. However, we expect that to change imminently. Meanwhile, Google Slides for Android continues to use a transparent status bar, but its search bar isn’t fixed to the top of the screen as you scroll, meaning there’s no need for a fix.