Chrome for Android Lets You Put Wallpapers and Themes on the New Tab Page

Chrome's new tab page on Android has been the same plain white sheet for years. That is changing: an Appearance section is now reaching the stable browser, letting you drop a wallpaper, a preset colour scheme or one of Google's curated theme collections behind the search box. According to reports, it is showing up on Chrome 151 for Android, specifically build 151.0.7922.71.

Where the new setting lives

The entry point is the same customisation menu Chrome already had, so it is easy to miss. Open a new tab, tap the three-dot menu at the top right, then choose Customize new tab page. If your copy has the update, an Appearance row now sits alongside the existing controls.

That existing panel is worth a look while you are in there. It also governs My shortcuts (the grid of most-visited sites), the New Tab page cards — Continue with this tab, Price drops on tabs, Safety Check and Chrome tips — and whether the Discover feed appears at all, with separate controls for the Activity and Interests that shape it.

The four appearance options

• Chrome default — puts the page back to the plain look, and doubles as the undo button if you overdo it.
• Upload an image — uses one of your own photos as the background.
• Chrome colours — preset colour themes, with an optional daily shuffle.
• Theme collections — curated wallpaper sets grouped as Landscape, Architecture, Earth, Patterns, Illustrations and Gradients. These also support the daily refresh.

Anyone who uses Chrome on a laptop will recognise all of this. Desktop Chrome has offered backgrounds, colours and collections from its Customise Chrome panel for years, and the daily-refresh trick is lifted straight from it. Android has simply been waiting its turn.

The requirement people will trip over

Here is the detail that explains most of the "I don't have it" complaints, and it is documented by Google rather than inferred: customising the new tab page requires that you are signed in to your Google Account and that Google is set as your default search engine. If you browse signed out, or you switched the address bar over to another search provider, the customisation options do not apply — no amount of updating will surface them.

Assuming both of those are true, the ordinary checks apply. Update Chrome from the Play Store, confirm the version under Settings then About Chrome, and force-close the app before opening a new tab again.

A long time behind a flag

This is not a surprise feature so much as a slow one. The customisation rework has sat behind the chrome://flags/#new-tab-page-customization experiment since 2025, and the first half of it — the cards and Discover controls — was approved in Chromium to switch on by default for all users well before the theming half was ready. The appearance options stayed experimental through that period, which is why they are only now arriving in a normal release.

One caveat worth stating plainly: Google's own support documentation for the Android new tab page still describes only the shortcuts, cards and feed toggles. It has not yet been updated to cover wallpapers, colours or collections, so treat the rollout as in progress rather than finished. Staged rollouts of this kind typically arrive in waves over a couple of weeks, and Google has not published a completion date.

Worth turning on?

It is cosmetic, and it will not make Chrome faster. But the new tab page is one of the most-seen screens on any phone, and a themed background makes it far easier to tell your work profile from your personal one at a glance. If you are weighing Chrome against the alternatives on Android, our Chrome versus Brave comparison covers the trade-offs that actually matter, and it is a good moment to make sure you are current after the browser's large batch of security fixes earlier this year.