A fix for broken (virtual) buttons and dead touch area on Android phones

My old Android smartphone fell too many times and had its physical buttons (back, home, recent apps) not working, which was problematic to do anything. You can go back with in-app buttons most of the times, but there is no way to switch app or to go back to the desktop.

One good fix is to use an app that will put the back and home button functions as touch gestures, for example swiping from the borders of the screen. To this avail I suggest Fluid Navigation Gestures. In case you absolutely needed to trigger the home button, for example, you can connect the phone to the computer, enable ADB, and trigger any key you would like with it.

Navigation gestures are a good fix until you realized that not even the spacebar (or the whole lower row of keyboard keys) would not work. So in the end, the real solution is to prevent Android from drawing anything in the bottom part of the screen (or, at any rate, the broken part, wherever it is — as long as it is on some side and not central). And it turns out it is actually possible to resize the screen area in Android!

In the end, the commands I used have been:

adb shell wm overscan 0,0,0,120
adb shell wm density 420

and then the navigation gestures were actually even useless, as I could have the navigation bar on screen.