Galaxy 21 would drop Bixby in favor of Google on the home screen

According to a new leak, Samsung has decided to drop Bixby on the home screen in favor of Google Discover. What give an alternative to users looking for a better source of information selected by artificial intelligence. The functionality would not only affect the Galaxy S21, but all smartphones running One UI 3.1.

Galaxy s21
Credits: Ice Universe via Twitter

You don’t like Bixby? The voice assistant made in Samsung has replaced S Voice since 2017. It has not been satisfied for a long time to take into account your voice commands. Since, like its competitors, such as Google Assistant and Siri, it achieves many activities based on machine learning. One of these features is the information curation directly from the home screen. A service powered by Bixby and which takes various names depending on the country – in France, it is Upday.

The problem is that so far, Samsung rather gave the impression of doing a little forcing with its ecosystem of Bixby services. For example, it is only possible to replace the voice assistant with the Google Assistant solution, or Alexa, by means of a somewhat baroque hack – via quick order. This does not ultimately allow to deliver an interaction as natural as on a smartphone where Google Assistant for example is completely integrated into the user experience, such as the latest Google Pixels.

In the same way he was so far not possible to replace the news concocted by Bixby by another service on the home screen. However, we discover at the bend of a response to a tweet from leaker Max Weinbach that the lines are moving, and that the S21 will offer at least a little more freedom to users. In the video under the tweet below, we can indeed see a swipe to the left, which opens… Google Discover! The user explains that the S21 taken on video runs under OneUI 3.1.

Which suggests that the change will be available on all compatible smartphones with the next Samsung OneUI 3.0 overlay. It remains to be seen whether Google’s presence in the next Samsung smartphones will be more entrenched than until now. We hope that Samsung will finally let Bixby completely replace Bixby with something else, without there being a little disappointing condition for doing so. Answer soon: Samsung is expected to unveil the S21 on January 14, 2020.