Ever since Samsung released a phone with a totally useless button, the Bixby button even though Bixby itself wasn’t available yet, developers have been fighting to make that button useful. Many though are sick of the constant fight with Samsung and just want to disable it. Samsung allowed this recently but the button still turned the display on. Not any more.
In a recent update Samsung added an option to “Don’t Open Anything” to the Bixby button settings. Unfortunately, although that changed the Bixby button to not open anything pressing it still resulted in waking the display. Now in the latest update to the Bixby suite of apps pressing the button will no longer activate the display. For the small number of users who actually find Bixby useful there are also some updates to the apps that will extend the usability to them.
To update just head into Galaxy Apps and update everything in there. For those who would prefer not to wait for the update to arrive and don’t mind manually updating head over to APK Mirror for the newest Bixby, Bixby Home, and Bixby Service apps.
Where Samsung are heading with Bixby is unknown. Their Bixby speaker never materialised and this change to the Bixby button may be them admitting that Bixby is not ready for the prime time. Having used Bixby I found it a very poor option to Google Assistant but that does not mean Samsung are giving up, just that they have a long way to go for Bixby to be relevant. It is a matter of convincing their billions of users to use it so they can obtain the relevant data required to make it better.
Do you use Bixby? How have you found it?
