How to change the search engine on android? To a non-listed one

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I want this search engine. How to make it a default one? On android, mobile. Not PC. Thank you!!

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It doesn’t appear here. Can you let me add it…??

Please fix this in the new patch, thank you!! Much love!

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@Eliah99 Android does not let you manually add search engines like you can do on iOS and Desktop. I’m not quite sure when, or if, this will ever change. This is an inherited issue from Chromium in general. If you check Chrome on Android, you’ll see it doesn’t let you manually add either.

What both rely on is OpenSearch, though Brave does leave a toggle even for that where Chrome won’t offer a way to turn it off.

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The way this works is if you have opted into it, then if a website is set up to work with OpenSearch, it gets added to the list of search engines automatically as you use the website.

For the website you linked to be added, they would need to have code for the xml to be shared, then it would be added as you’re using the website. But if they don’t have it set to be discovered for OpenSearch, you’d be out of luck.

You can see where LibreY actually was added to yours based on activity, whereas it otherwise would not normally be on the list.

- Two Things To Note-

  1. Brave has an open Github issue for this. It has been open since 2022 and I see Brian Clifton , Vice President of Engineering at Brave, even mentioned the issue last month. So it means this is still something open and to be worked on. But it is labeled as P3, which means it’s kind of a lower to mid-tier priority. These can take months to years to finish depending on other things happening. I really don’t know what to say for an ETA on this getting accomplished. Obviously it’s already been 3 years with no improvement.
  1. I see an old Chromium issue from 2016 at https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40353868 which had a P2 marking but no movement in a long time. I didn’t dive in to see if they have any other open issues.

If this change ever could happen upstream via Chromium, then it would also land on Brave. Usually people can have better luck getting changes made upstream than you can actually getting Brave to deviate. This is because they have a larger developer team than Brave and it can be a lot of work maintaining changes “downstream” after each upstream update.

cc: @Mattches

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