How to deactivate device hardware (physical) buttons such as Task & Home Buttons (Android 13)

Question

In order to run our application on runtime on devices exclusively meant for it, I want to disable device hardware buttons such as Home, Task & Back buttons. My Android version is 13, device is Samsung Galaxy Tab Active 3 2020 although I want it to work on other devices. I already know I have to edit /system/usr/keylayout/Generic.kl and the app has root privileges. So I run this in runtime which was correctly working on Android 10:

Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec("su");
DataOutputStream os = new DataOutputStream(p.getOutputStream());
os.writeBytes("mount -o remount,rw /\n");
os.writeBytes("sed -i 's/^[^#]*BACK/# &/' /system/usr/keylayout/Generic.kl\n");
os.writeBytes("sed -i 's/^[^#]*HOME/# &/' /system/usr/keylayout/Generic.kl\n");
os.writeBytes("sed -i 's/^[^#]*APP_SWITCH/# &/' /system/usr/keylayout/Generic.kl\n");
os.writeBytes("reboot\n");
os.writeBytes("exit\n");
os.flush();

But The problem is, as soon as the first edit on Generic.kl is performed, meaning this line:

sed -i 's/^[^#]*BACK/# &/' /system/usr/keylayout/Generic.kl\n

The tablet gets rebooted automatically and the file Generic.kl is restored to its initial state. So, no success with editing it programmatically.

Answer 1

I'm not sure about the context of your requirement however, in newer Android versions (including Android 13), the system partition is mounted as read-only by default to improve security.

You can try a custom launcher application that runs as the default home screen. This launcher can hide the hardware buttons or handle their actions according to your application's requirements.