This blog post was drafted with ChatGPT and edited manually. The same AI conversation was used to help find the public Bixby launch activity.

Samsung’s Bixby isn’t as straightforward to launch programmatically as a normal Android app. In this session, we used ADB (Android Debug Bridge) to inspect Bixby’s internal activities, determine which ones were visible, and figure out what Samsung allows external apps to launch.

First, we enabled USB debugging and connected the device to ADB. After resolving an “unauthorized” device error by approving the debugging prompt on the phone, we used:

adb shell dumpsys window windows

This showed the currently focused Bixby window, revealing that the active fullscreen UI was:

com.samsung.android.bixby.agent/.mainui.main.fullscreen.FullScreenActivity

That looked promising, but when we tried launching it directly with:

adb shell am start -n com.samsung.android.bixby.agent/.mainui.main.fullscreen.FullScreenActivity

Android threw a SecurityException, telling us the activity was not exported. In Android terms, that means Samsung intentionally blocked external apps and ADB from launching that screen.

Next, we searched for a Bixby activity that was exported and found:

com.samsung.android.bixby.agent/com.samsung.android.bixby.assistanthome.AssistantHomeLauncherActivity

This is Samsung’s public launcher activity for Bixby Home, and it can be started externally.

To dig deeper into voice input, we dumped Bixby’s package info with pm dump and searched for voice-related actions and activities. This exposed several voice-related activities, but the key discovery was that the real Bixby Voice interface is protected by a privileged permission:

com.samsung.android.bixby.agent.permission.LAUNCH_BIXBY_VOICE

marked as:

signature|privileged

That means only Samsung system apps can trigger the full voice assistant. We did find one exported voice-related UI:

QuickCommandVoiceInputActivity

which provides a limited voice recording interface for Bixby Quick Commands, but not the full Bixby Voice assistant.

In short: Bixby Home can be launched externally, but the full Bixby Voice assistant is locked behind Samsung system permissions and cannot be triggered by ADB or third-party apps. This is a good example of how Android’s exported activity model and privileged permissions shape what can and cannot be automated.

That exported launcher activity is now being used in SwitchAI, a 1k+ starred GitHub repo, where the Bixby assistant integration was updated in BixbyAssistant.kt to launch Samsung’s public Bixby entry point instead of relying on blocked internal activities. This makes Bixby launching more reliable on modern Samsung devices by using the same exported activity Samsung intentionally exposes for external integrations.