Android - How to make Google Chrome definitely remain as the desktop version?

There's a method suggested here, based on this XDA thread for both rooted and non rooted devices:

Rooted Devices

  • First Method: Download a file ( chrome-command-line) mentioned in the article, change it's properties and place in appropriate directory, relaunch Chrome

  • Second Method: From the XDA thread linked, download ChromeDE.zip and flash

Since I don't have access to PC, tried the second method and it worked. Chrome now opens in default desktop mode ( Moto X Play, 6.0.1, Chrome 52.0. 2743.91)

Unrooted Devices (not tried by me)

  • Download the file mentioned in first method above

  • Using adb , enter

    adb push /chrome-command-line /data/local/chrome-command-line

Thanks for asking this, I have been wanting to do this but was too lazy to search

Edit: User Agent Switcher app for rooted devices can do the same, and in addition offers a host of other choices and creating shortcuts

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New method for Un-rooted devices

There is a new flag that's just been implemented to enable this on un-rooted devices in Chrome but its just in the Canary version currently.

  1. Install the latest Chrome from the Play Store.
  2. After its installed go into chrome://flags
  3. Search for 'command line' and it should come up with an option:
    • Enable command line on non-rooted devices
  4. Change the value to Enabled
  5. Install ADB and the USB drivers for your phone (See XDA developers article or Google)

  6. Download the chrome-command-line.txt file as in the XDA article and rename it without the .txt on the end. The content will be:

     chrome --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/22.0.1207.1 Safari/537.1"

  7. Using ADB you can now transfer the chrome-command-line file over to the /tmp folder, which does not need root permissions, using:

    adb push c:\tempadb\chrome-command-line /data/local/tmp/chrome-command-line

  8. Restart Chrome and you should now effectively have desktop mode all the time.

According to the change log, the feature was implemented by Lei Tian, so a big thanks to him. Details of the change can be found here:

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/bd5a3bf9cfeac08e9fbaae39b7f18a67c079bf96

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