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Samsung opened up the ability to remap the dedicated Bixby button on the Galaxy S8, S9, and S10 with its One UI update and now it seems Google is adopting a similar approach. The first beta of Android Q was released this week and it allows the Active Edge feature on the Pixel 2 and Pixel 3 to be remapped to another virtual assistant.
Active Edge allows you to squeeze the edges of your Pixel 2, Pixel 2 XL, Pixel 3, or Pixel 3 XL to launch Google Assistant. Now, with the help of Android Q and a third-party app, this can be remapped to launch a different assistant, although we’re not sure why you’d want to.
The discovery isn’t widely published as a feature of Android Q, but XDA has been digging around the beta release and discovered a hidden property that can be enabled to allow third-party assistants to be triggered by Active Edge. It’s disabled by default, but can be enabled using ADB quite easily.
How to enable Active Edge remapping
- Connect your Pixel to your PC and run ADB.
- Confirm your device is visible to ADB with the commands “adb devices”.
- Issue the following command:
adb shell settings put secure assist_gesture_any_assistant 1
- You’ll then need to head into Settings to select which assistant app to use.
With the help of Tasker, you can change Active Edge to trigger any app you like instead of just assistants. The video below shows you how to do just that.
Active Edge is one of the most useful features on the Pixel so being able to hook into this and remap it to perform any number of tasks is extremely powerful, especially if you tend to trigger Google Assistant using the hotword. It is also interesting why Google didn’t publicize this as a feature of Android Q and chose to natively disable the flag – perhaps it was being saved for a future release?
Let us know if you’ve tried this out and what you’ve remapped Active Edge to in the comments below.
Source: XDA
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