When Samsung launched the Galaxy S8 it had one major omission. Despite the inclusion of a dedicated button to launch Bixby, the virtual assistant wasn’t ready for the prime time.
Samsung confirmed the voice assistant portion of the software wouldn’t be ready in time and thus trigger the race to see if the dedicated Bixby button could be remapped to something more useful. Multiple solutions have been released only to be patched shortly after by Samsung.
The latest Samsung Galaxy S8 patch issued by T-Mobile once again disables the use of apps that remapped the dedicated button for another purpose. Samsung (obviously) doesn’t seem to condone the practice of remapping the button:
The dedicated Bixby button gives consumers an easy, and convenient way to launch Bixby – just like using a walkie talkie. We think it’s important to consumers this option in case they prefer it to using a wakeup word. Bixby has been designed to seamlessly work with our hardware so that you can easily switch from physical to voice control whenever you wish. To provide this ideal experience, the Bixby button will only work with Bixby, so Samsung does not support remapping the Bixby button.
However, it wasn’t long before bxActions, which is one of the more popular remapping apps, got updated to change the method it used and therefore once again bypass the new restriction imposed by the update.
It seems that only T-Mobile customers got the update to block the Bixby remapping while those on the June security update on other carriers seem to not have been affected.
However, if you rely on software to remap the Bixby button to something else then it’s worth updating to the latest version of bxActions to ensure it still works.
