Galaxy S10 coming with more exclusive tweaks

Feb 21, 2019 07:31 GMT  ·  By

Like its predecessors, the Samsung Galaxy S10 also comes with a Bixby button, only that the South Korean company is embracing a different approach for this generation.

The firm has decided to actually allow users to remap the button to anything they like, including third-party apps.

But let’s rewind a little bit and see what this means for existing and new Samsung Galaxy users.

First and foremost, the Bixby button has been there from the very beginning to let users launch the digital assistant with just a press of a button. The idea isn’t necessarily wrong, and Samsung most likely decided to use this approach in order to make people aware of its assistant.

As more and more users launched it by mistake, Samsung introduced updates that made it harder to do this, like a double-click option on the Bixby button. While this reduced the number of accidental launches of Bixby, this still wasn’t the behavior users expected, especially because many didn’t want Bixby at all.

Only available on the Galaxy S10

A number of third-party tweaks made it possible to disable Bixby entirely or remap the button to a different task, but this often involved changes that not everyone was willing to do. Some used accessibility services, and Samsung’s updates broke them down on several occasions.

So now it seems like Samsung has finally heard the message loud and clear, and the company decided it’s time to give its users more control over their devices. Unfortunately, while it will indeed be possible to remap the Bixby button, this feature will only be available on the latest model, so you’ll have to purchase the Galaxy S10 for this.

Samsung hasn’t said anything about a potential update for the Galaxy S9 and Note 9 that would provide similar functionality, but for now, this just seems to be another way to entice buyers to get an S10.