Samsung's latest crop of flagship phones -- Galaxy S8, Galaxy S8+ and Galaxy Note 8 -- have a dedicated button that can only be used to launch the company's smart assistant, Bixby.

Not everyone cared for Bixby (especially since it took forever for Samsung to actually enable it on its phones), so third-party hacks appeared shortly after the launch of S8, letting users change the button's functionality to something else. Samsung wouldn't have that, so it quickly made it impossible to change the button's behavior.

Now, Samsung has relented and made it possible to disable the button -- to an extent. Inexplicably, though, you still can't reassign the button to a different function.

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According to Sammobile, Samsung appears to be slowly rolling this functionality out to users in the form of a Bixby update. Once you install it, you'll get a toggle at the top of Bixby Home, letting you turn the button on and off.

This doesn't make the button totally useless -- you can still press and hold it to activate Bixby Voice. Still, I bet that many users would welcome the ability to assign it to a completely different function.

Also, the toggle doesn't kill Bixby on your phone; you can still access it by swiping left on the home screen.

Samsung made Bixby available in the U.S. in July, after months of delays. The feature became globally available in August.

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TopicsSamsung