Samsung’s annoying Bixby button is finally customizable

Samsung’s new Galaxy S10 series is the company’s third lineup of flagship phones to come with Bixby built-in. 

But the phones will be the first to let you actually change what that Bixby button does, addressing what has long been one of Samsung’s most frustrating features.

The company confirmed the change in a blog post, noting that the S10 will be the first of Samsung’s phones to have “Bixby Key Customization,” which lets users change their Bixby settings so that pressing the Bixby button once or twice will launch a third-party app of their choice. Samsung also said it would extend the feature to its earlier phones with Bixby, including the S8, S9, and Note9, in a future software update.

The dedicated Bixby button has been a major annoyance since it was first introduced with the S8. The voice assistant, which wasn’t even available when the S8 first launched, has been widely panned as inferior to Google Assistant and Alexa. Yet the presence of a hardware button on the side of your phone almost guaranteed that you would accidentally press it at inopportune moments. Not only that, but Samsung intentionally disabled the ability to remap the button to do something else.

Not anymore, though. With “Bixby Key Customization” feature, you can designate a single or double tap of the button to launch any app you want, including Google Assistant to Alexa.

As The Verge points out, this unfortunately doesn’t mean you can erase Bixby entirely. If you customize one of the two shortcuts as a non-Bixby app, the other shortcut will still launch the assistant. But, short of disabling the button entirely, it’s a decent compromise.