S8's Bixby button can no longer be remapped
Even though Galaxy S8's voice assistant doesn't have a voice just yet, Samsung doesn't want you using its dedicated button for anything else. The company has just pushed an update that stops the users from giving any other purpose to the Bixby button. As far as I'm concerned, it's not that hard to understand why the company would want to make it as hard as possible for its customers to use different assistants, but it could have at least thought about it from the get-go.
For those of you who don't know what this is all about, one of the highlight features of the freshly launched Galaxy S8 is Samsung's new virtual assistant called Bixby. The assistant has a dedicated button on the side of the phone that can be pressed to call it up. However, many people were using a third-party application called All in One Gestures to remap the dedicated Bixby button for other purposes such as calling up the Google Assistant, opening a Google Search, etc. Unfortunately, the users of the XDA-Developers forum have recently discovered that Samsung has blocked this possibility, thus forcing people to either use Bixby or have a button that they'll never use on their phones.
Being totally new to this market and having to compete with already established forces such as Siri or Google Assistant, it's easy to see why Samsung would want all of its customers to use Bixby, but it would probably be best if the company started by delivering the complete product and, then seeing if people actually find it useful.
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