Users can choose years by touching "2017" on the top-left corner. This UI might not be intuitive. But it's an issue of the UI widget of Android OS.  Please file an issue for Android [1].

IMO, we don't need an HTML attribute or CSS property for the UI behavior customization for this.  However if you want one, please file an issue for WHATWG or CSSWG.

[1] https://source.android.com/source/report-bugs

Thank you for your reply. I am confused though. When I go to report a browser issue for Android I get the following message: 

Please do not open WebView and/or Browser bugs here. Use Chromium Issue Tracker (https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/list) instead. When using the Chromium Issue Tracker, choose Android as the operating system, and describe whether it is a WebView or a Chrome browser problem in the description. 



Where should I report this bug if not here? Thank you.

To clarify, Android has various types of date picker but Chrome for Android is choosing to use one that may not be the best fit for fields like date of birth, etc. As such, this seems to be a Chrome issue to me as it should be able to display whichever date picker it wants. Please help my lack of understanding. Thank you.

Chromium uses android.app.DatePickerDialog with the default style.  Though it might be possible for Chromium to specify spinner-style date picker explicitly, it's not a right fix.

The calendar-style date picker of Android system shouldn't have the unintuitiveness for year selection. Fixing the unintuitive issue in Android system will improve UX of many Android applications.

I agree that fixing the calendar view date picker at the core of Android is the right long term fix.

I found this morning https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/37101046 which tracks this issue for Android in general.

I am concerned that even once it is fixed there will still be versions of Android running Chrome for years to come where it won't be fixed and this will make adoption of the HTML date input type difficult. Where I currently work, for example, we have decided to explicitly avoid the HTML date input type simply because of how it works on Chrome.

I motion that adding CSS support (or something similar) to explicitly specify the mode, calendar or spinner, is still an appropriate short and long term fix so that developers can give their users a better experience.

Even within the same web page both date picker modes may want to be used. e.g. one input for date of birth and one input to schedule an appointment in the near future. The prior would use the spinner mode while the later would use the calendar view.