Although the device is a piece of art and functions smoothly too, users have been left wanting for more when it comes to the Bixby button. Samsung’s in-house AI-powered personal assistant that made its debut in the company’s latest flagship isn’t even completely developed yet but the company has confirmed that remapping the button won’t be officially supported. For those of you who aren’t very keen on what Bixby has to offer and are dumbfounded with the idea of having a physical button on your device that won’t be of much use to you — we have a solution.
Meet BixRemap
A free app on the Google Play Store which lets gives you the power to remap the Bixby Button in a jiffy. All you need to do is install the app, run it, provide it usage tracking permission — this is the tricky part — and then you can select any app to replace Bixby from its assigned button. The app is quite fresh out of development but still does what it says — just with a little glitch. When you press the Bixby button after the remap is completed using BixRemap, before your selected app opens up, Samsung’s prized assistant shows up for a second. This can be partially fixed using an in-app feature called ‘Scan Interval’ which will decrease the time taken by the app of your choice to open up but be careful, this might hamper your battery life. “A simple app I designed in 20 minutes. If there’s any more interest in this, I can develop this further. Just a test app at the moment,” Dave Bennett, the app developer says. The app will help you remap the Bixby button to function as a button to quickly open your camera app, Google assistant or any other app you prefer that’s installed on your phone. If sharing your app usage information with the developer seems like a fair exchange for remapping your Bixby button, then BixRemap should work just fine for you.
