Samsung’s Bixby button is structural bloatware

It’s hard to argue that Samsung hasn’t had a terrific year so far. In 2017, the world’s most

prolific smartphone maker delivered a critically acclaimed new flagship in the Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus, and it followed that up with a record-breaking Note 8 super flagship. Redemption complete, right? Well, not so fast. Even as it rises to new heights of software and design refinement, Samsung is holding on to some bad habits, the chief of which has a name and a sort of anthropomorphized form: Bixby. Bixby is Samsung’s answer to Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Assistant, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Apple’s Siri. It’s supposed to be the smart spirit that lives inside your phone and proactively helps you get through your day. Before Google Assistant was a thing, the Mountain View company spoke of the concept as “search without search”: turning the contextual awareness of your phone into a series of automatic triggers to surface useful information. Most of us are familiar with these (still rudimentary) assistive qualities, which synergize nicely with voice controls and natural-language searches to set the stage for a future where we just talk to our smart and informed pocket computers. Only problem is that Bixby represents none of that usefulness or nascent promise.                                                                                            https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/18/16326636/samsung-bixby-button-bloatware