How to Completely Disable the Galaxy S10 Bixby Button?

Adding more buttons to the side of the smartphone can seem like a good idea. However, there are some people who simply want three buttons on the sides of their device (Power, Volume Up, and Volume Down). Since Samsung doesn’t let us disable the button natively, we need to use ADB in order to get the job done. The Bixby button controversy is well known to anyone who has paid attention to Android news headlines over the last few years. People want to use the button for other things but Samsung only recently began allowing us to do this. Others have wanted to disable the button entirely but Samsung continues to try and convince people to use it. Some people dislike it because of accidental presses. If this is your case then you can simply go into the Bixby Voice settings and set the feature to only activate when the button is pressed twice. If you don’t change anything else then those singular button presses will not do anything. That’s enough to solve the issue for most people but others want to completely disable the button entirely. For that, we need to open up a command prompt and enter a couple of ADB commands.

Note – this tutorial currently only works on Android 9 due to Samsung changing up the Bixby package names. I am currently looking into an updated method for this for Android 10 owners.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOwMc4tPvKM

The method used above is a common way of “uninstalling” applications for a particular user. I go into more detail about how this is essentially just disabling the app for the current user (aka you). But just know that this does not require root nor does it prevent you from accept OTA updates. If you’ve ever gone through the Apps section of the Settings application and disabled a pre-installed application (such as Facebook or Microsoft Office apps) then know that this is basically what we’re doing here. The Settings app doesn’t let us disable any application in the list though. That is why we need to do it via ADB. Sure, you could find this application in the apps list but the disable button would be grayed out (or not existent). Just like with the limitation Samsung has put on preventing people from opening the Google Assistant with the Bixby button. . .we can bypass this as well. If you want to only disable Bixby while leaving in the Google Assistant option in place, you can use bxActions as I have suggested in the past.

Is Bixby Gone Forever?

Using the method above we have “uninstalled” Bixby for the current user. As mentioned, this is more or less just a workaround that lets us disable the Bixby service (and the button in general). That means the application will come back if you do a factory reset. It may also come back after you accept an OTA update too. So be aware of that. However, we can also manually bring this application (and the Bixby button) back by executing a different command. For this to work, you will need to repeat steps 1 through 4 of the tutorial above. After you have executed the ADB shell command, then you will need to execute the following command. . .

• cmd package install-existing com.samsung.android.bixby.agent

That will bring the application back without having to do a factory reset or accepting an OTA update. It will be as if you had never activated Bixby though (as it is essentially being reinstalled for the current user). So you will want to press the Bixby button on the Galaxy S10, Galaxy S10 Lite, Galaxy S10+, or Galaxy S10e after you enter this command. You will see Bixby go through its regular activation process which requires you to agree to some terms and conditions. It will also prompt you to let Bixby learn your voice again too (but you can skip this part if you want). It will be as if you had never opened up the application (or used the Bixby button) before.