On-screen virtual back and home buttons

Question

I dropped my Nokia Lumia 820, and now there's a crack at the corner below the hardware search button, causing the 'back', 'home' and 'search' buttons to stop working.

There is no problem whatsoever with the display, and now whenever I go into any application, the only way to get out of it and go back to the home screen is to power off the phone and restart.

I was wondering if there was a way to turn on the on-screen virtual buttons for 'back', 'home' and 'search'; i'm on the latest WindowsPhone 8.1 OS and I read somewhere that this feature is supported.

However, if the onscreen virtual buttons can't be done, is there an app, or a way that I can programmatically(i'll code it up myself) have a persistent notification (since I can always swipe down from any app) that just navigates me to the home screen.

Answer 1

First off, I'd recommend getting the display fixed. I don't think that there is an other solution that will satisfy you in the long term.

Having said that, you could write an app that pushes out notifications and just crashes on launch. However, there are no "persistent" notifications (they will disappear when you hit them) and you can only send out notifications every half hour from a background task. You could of course just spam your a couple of messages to have some in stock.

Unfortunately there is no way to turn on the software buttons on phones that have hardware ones due to the screen ratio.