Worry not, you can still have Bixby on older Samsung smartphones

Samsung’s Bixby might not have as great a rap as Google Assistant or Alexa, but it has certainly become more useful since its 2.0 refresh. Now, SamMobile reports that Samsung will be pulling the plug on Bixby for older Galaxy devices running Android Nougat or Oreo. A bevy of headlines might have you believe that this is the end of Bixby on older Samsung flagships, but that’s not the case at all.

Samsung is allegedly only ending support for the older Bixby version. Apparently, Samsung wants people to upgrade to Bixby 2.0. Galaxy S8, S8 Plus, S8 Active, Note 8, and Galaxy A9 (2018) devices running Android Nougat or Oreo will reportedly lose Bixby support on January 1, 2020. Bixby Voice and Bixby Briefing will no longer work on these phones with the older versions of Android. However, the good news is that to continue using Bixby, all you have to do it update your phones to Android Pie.

The Android 9 Pie update is already available for all of the above mentioned devices.  If you haven’t yet updated your older Galaxy phones to Pie, it’s advisable that you do the same before January 1, 2020 to retain Bixby access.

With Android Pie, users will also get the latest version of Bixby Voice. It has a better interface and natural language processing abilities compared to Bixby 1.0. You can do a lot of useful things with the virtual assistant such as changing your phone’s settings, downloading apps, creating routines and more.

If you would rather remap the Bixby button to something else, you can learn how to do so with our tutorial here. You can also check out some of the best Bixby remapping apps here.