At first, it was easy to remap the dedicated Bixby button to be remapped for other actions. Samsung fought back with multiple updates but thankfully one application has stuck through it all. Using the free 3rd-party application bxActions, we can open up Google Assistant or Google Now using the Bixby button on the Galaxy Note 9.
Note – As Samsung has kept their software up to date, you’ll want to refer to this guide if the software on your device is up to date as well.
It’s this cat and mouse game that Samsung has played with the developer community which causes them to lose customers. HTC is a great example of how to do customization right with their Edge Sense squeezing gesture. You can set that software up to do all sorts of things if you’re using the company’s in-house Sense version of Android.
Although, HTC is a poor example as their mobile division has been losing money for so long. We can look at Google as another example though as they have an identical feature which they call Active Edge. The stock software only lets you set a couple of things with this but there are 3rd-party applications that will let you set it to whatever you want and Google hasn’t fought back against them.
Let’s be honest here though, Samsung is mammoth beast right now in the smartphone market so small things like this aren’t going to cause them to actually lose money. They may lose a few sales of the Galaxy Note 9 because of it, but they’ll still be making millions of dollars on smartphones year after year until someone is able to dethrone them. People used to think HTC couldn’t be dethroned too so Samsung needs to listen to their customer base.
There are a lot of different things that we can use this Bixby button for thanks to this bxActions application. I may pick and choose some of the more popular options and do tutorials about them in the future. However, opening up the Google Assistant is the most common request so I thought I would cover it first. Feel free to experiment with this application to see what else it can do.
How Does bxActions Open Google Assistant Instead of Bixby?
During steps 2 and 4 of the tutorial above, we are giving the bxActions application special access to our Galaxy Note 9. This type of special access isn’t something you would want to give to every single application (as there are a lot of sketchy developers out there). However, bxActions has proven to be safe and after you follow this tutorial you will notice that it is quite effective too.
The application is waiting for the Bixby application to launch and it will instantly close it when that happens. This is the flash you saw in the previous tutorial when I showed you how to disable the Galaxy Note 9 Bixby button entirely. The Bixby application opens with a white flash of the screen, but then goes away since bxActions has been set to kill the service.
This flash is less apparent when we have a certain action set to the button cause we’re expecting something to happen when we press it. If the button is set to disabled, even a flash can be jarring to us unless we are to the point that we’re used to it. But we barely notice the flash if we have the Galaxy Note 9 Bixby button set to open up Google Assistant, YouTube, our favorite music streaming service, or anything else.
Just like before, there are a number other options and tweaks that we can do with bxActions that I will be covering in the future so stay tuned as all of these will work on any Samsung device that has a dedicated Bixby button.
