After searching the internet it seems quite evergreen question. My tablet runs Android 14, I just installed latest Brave, intending to use it as the main browser. Without a descent search engine it cannot be my main browser. 
I do not see anything promising in settings, there is no option to add an engine. Why? The PC version still has it, although it is not straightforward. Yandex can be set in Firefox …
@Segfault this is an option, but you are right that it’s more annoying because you can’t easily manually add. Go to your settings → search engines and make sure to enable Index other search engines like you see in the screenshot below.
Then you visit places. Such as I went to Yandex and did some searches. Then after a short period, going back to settings → search engines you can see Yandex was added. I can click it and that becomes my default search engine.
Thank you. Thank you very much. I have to say this is my first experience with Android and it is nightmarish. Well, after using mostly Gentoo (and other POSIX systems) for 21+ years where command line and text editor allow full control of the system Android seems nothing less than sinister. Plus some basic features are missing! No NFS support, no F2FS support, SSH client is possible, but no server. Not to mention using any Google services effectively means waiving my 4th amendment rights. I have realized to make my Android tablet useful I have to root it. What a bummer. Heck, even in macOS handling NFS shares is only a matter of opening the terminal and running commands. Not in Android, no no. What an impotent, restrictive, possessive operating system. Yuk.
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It’s weird, in some ways Android is more open than iOS and others. But then as you mention, certain aspects have tighter controls. Apple has been opening up a bit more in recent years but still highly restrictive on what apps people can use and in which format.
I do have to say that I really prefer Brave on iPhone than compared to Android. For a while there Android was better because it was more similar to the desktop, with better Shields protection. But it’s getting closer to being equal, though iPhone does have extras like Playlist that is missing elsewhere.
And yeah, iOS version of Brave lets you manually type in the search engines like you do for the browser. It also allows you to add custom favorites to your dashboard, whereas I think Android is still limited to it only showing your most visited websites and gives no real control over it.
Anyway, it’s indeed amazing at how things can be so different from each other based on OS controls.
No cigar, after using Yandex repeatedly it does not appear among available search engines. In my desktop I see there is ~/.config/BraveSoftware/Brave-Browser/Default/Preferences, which is a JSON file. I guess I could edit it to set the default search engine. But I do not feel compelled to waste may time on hacking some nasty application. I’m switching over to Yandex browser. Thanks for your help.
I made one last attempt. My default was Brave when I did my Yandex searches, and it wasn’t added. Looking at your screenshot I did the same, I set Google as default. Did some Yandex searches again and a miracle happened, Yandex appeared!
I still detest this kind of software, I’m used to FOSS where everything is easy, under users control. As I said, my first experience with Android (I do not own a smartphone).
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