Now Bar Gets Internet Speed Meter on Galaxy Phones (Unofficially)

Samsung’s Now Bar is designed to surface real-time information from apps, but it comes with a major limitation. Only first-party Samsung apps and a handful of approved partners can display content there. For everyone else, including popular utilities like internet speed monitors, Now Bar doesn’t show real-time data. That restriction hasn’t sat well with power users, and now, someone has found a clever workaround.

This app brings a real-time internet speed monitor to Now Bar

A developer has managed to bypass Samsung’s whitelist by taking an unconventional route. They forked an open-source speed meter app and modified it to impersonate a whitelisted app, specifically the Korean ride-hailing service Kakao T. By spoofing the package identity, the modified app, dubbed Nowbar Meter, is able to inject a live internet speed indicator directly into the Now Bar.

The result feels native: real-time speed updates displayed right in the status pill, just like an officially supported app. It works on any Samsung Galaxy smartphone running One UI 7 or newer. However, since it’s a spoofed app, you must sideload the APK, which has its own risks (unofficial APKs may contain malware). Google Play Protect may even flag it as unsafe, requiring you to force install the package.

There’s one more caveat. You must not update this app via the Play Store. Since it uses the same package name as Kakao T, any official update from the Play Store could overwrite it with the actual ride-hailing app. That would remove the speed meter entirely and replace it with a completely different application. For new features and enhancements, sideload the latest version when available (source link below).

How to get this app

The developer of this app shared the APK via GitHub. The latest version (v1.1) was published a few hours ago, and it works as intended on Galaxy devices. Once you have downloaded the APK file from the link above, sideload it on your Galaxy. You may need to grant some permissions to allow sideloading. The app also requires notification access to feed data into Now Bar.

Once installed and granted permissions, Nowbar Meter runs continuously in the background, updating the pill with live network speed. You can stop it anytime, while the app also lets you disable Now Bar integration from Settings. It now remains to be seen whether Samsung expands official support for Now Bar to third-party network speed monitoring apps.