How to disable Bixby apps on a Samsung Galaxy phone

Introduction

I recently bought a Samsung Galaxy phone. It is OK, but I was very annoyed when I found out that I couldn't disable Bixby apps on your phone. In my opinion, Bixby apps (like Bixby Voice, Bixby Vision and Bixby Routines) are useless. But the trick is you can't disable them. And what's worse, these apps get unrevokable permissions to your camera, microphone, contacts, phone calls. Ouch, big red flag!

But we're developers, right? So the challenge was accepted, and I managed to disable Bixby apps without much trouble. In this tutorial, I will show you how to disable those pesky apps with the help of our lovely command-line tools!

A big disclaimer: complete the following steps at your own risk. You may mess up or even break your phone!

Prerequisites

Here are the things you need to have/know to complete this tutorial:

1. You need to know how to use a terminal to run commands
2. You need to have ADB Toolkit installed on your computer;
3. You need to have Samsung USB driver installed (if you're on Windows, MAC OS doesn't need it) on your computer;

Step 1 — Enable Android debugging mode on your phone

To enable Debugging mode, on your phone, go to the Settings > About phone > Software information and tap seven (7) times on the Build number, the magic will happen, and now you should see a new Developer options menu item.

Go to Settings > Developer options, find the USB debugging option, and turn it on. Now you're ready for hacking!

Step 2 — Connect your phone to a computer via USB

Connect your phone to your computer via USB cable. Check a prompt on your phone and tap Allow.

Step 3 — Ensure your computer sees your phone

Now launch a terminal on your computer and run the following command:

adb devices

You should see an output similar to:

List of devices attached
XXXXXXXXX   device

If you see a device in the output, that means everything is connected correctly, and you can proceed.

Step 4 — Disable Bixby apps

You will use Android Shell to disable services. Open a terminal and run the following command:

adb shell

You should see an active shell prompt:

r7:/ $

To disable the bixby service, type the following command into a shell and press Enter:

pm disable-user com.samsung.android.bixby.service

You should see the following confirmation:

Package com.samsung.android.bixby.service new state: disabled-user

Now repeat the same step entering the following commands:

1. pm disable-user com.samsung.android.bixby.agent
2. pm disable-user com.samsung.android.bixby.wakeup
3. pm disable-user com.samsung.android.bixbyvision.framework, if you want to disable Bixby Vision.
4. pm disable-user com.samsung.android.visionintelligence, if you want to disable Bixby Vision.
5. pm disable-user com.samsung.android.app.routines, if you want to disable Bixby Routines.

Finale

Now disconnect your phone and restart it. Then go to Settings > Apps, and you should see all Bixby apps as disabled.

Congratulations, you've done it!