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Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 5 offers more customizability at launch than its previous watches. Part of that is the ability to reprogram the home button and back keys to better suit your daily needs or workflows. And now that Google Assistant is available on Wear OS 3, you don’t have to settle for Samsung hard-coding Bixby as your default smartwatch assistant.
Out of the box, you can double-press the home button to go to the most recent app you used or long-press to bring up Bixby. The back button will bring you back to a previous screen with a short press and launch Samsung Pay with a long press. If these don’t work for you, you can edit these controls — with the exception of launching Samsung Pay. For whatever reason, Samsung won’t let you change that hard-coded control.
Reprogramming buttons isn’t unique to the Samsung Galaxy smartwatches, of course. Most watches will let you do this. However, with the Galaxy Watch 4 and 5 series, your choices are a bit more structured — and if you want to launch Google Assistant with a long press, there are a few extra steps. Here’s how to get started:
You can eschew Bixby completely if you like. Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
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