Well, that is pretty cool. Developers are able to get Samsung’s newly unveiled virtual assistant Up and running upon some of the older Samsung devices. As a developer on the Android website XDA-Developers showed, it was possible to get Bixby working on top of the S8’s launcher, which itself leaked earlier this week. Interestingly enough, it wasn’t just the S8 launcher which managed to run Bixby.
As per XDA-Developer‘s Mishaal Rahman, he was able to deploy Bixby and get it to work on his Galaxy S7 smartphone as well. The reports were echoed by other devs in the forum as well.
Just a few hours ago, users on our forums were able to rip Samsung’s Bixby Assistant from the Samsung Galaxy S8. This APK can be installed on any Samsung device running official Android Nougat, as I can confirm on my AT&T Samsung Galaxy S7. In order to make this APK work, you will first need to install the latest version of TouchWiz Launcher pulled from the S8, then go to TouchWiz Launcher’s settings to enable Bixby. Once that’s done, reboot the phone, and you should be able to swipe to the left to reveal the Bixby Assistant.
There are going to be differences though. For instance, the S8 features a dedicated button for waking Bixby up. Users were still able to get Bixby up and running on Android Nougat touting smartphones, however, the experience is likely to be somewhat different.
The devs also shared the Android Package Kit (APK) file for Bixby itself. Considering that Samsung isn’t planning to bring Bixby to the Play Store and from what we know, to the older iterations of its devices — the XDA developers may have come upon a loophole unnoticed by Samsung. After all, Bixby is one of the USPs of the Galaxy S8. It won’t really remain a USP much longer if just about anyone can install it on their devices.
