Samsung has announced it will discontinue a lot of the Bixby Vision augmented reality features. As reported by Sammobile, this comes after just three years of service for the features.
Samsung first filed the trademark for Bixby Vision back in 2017. This is when the company was willing to be big on the AR features.
Samsung continued to invest in the features. It continued to highlight the new innovations in Galaxy Note 10 back in 2019.
However, it now looks like Samsung’s gamble on AR has not paid off and in fact been a bit of a flop. As a result, the company has taken the decision to discontinue much fo Bixby Vision to cut their losses.
Samsung discontinues much of Bixby Vision
For a while, the augmented reality features on the app were seen as one of its main selling points. That is certainly how Samsung sold it in any case.
It looks as if Places, Styling, Home Decor, and Makeup could all be on the way out. However, it is possible that some users in very select markets may still be able to access them for the foreseeable future.
The reason for this is that Samsung began monetizing Bixby Vision through some standalone functionalities. The likelihood is that the company still has some exposure-related or other targets to hit as part of obligations to its partners.
This discontinuation looks set to take place towards the end of October. Samsung user began becoming aware of this back in September after the company pushed a notice out to users.
Samsung not ready to give up on AR
The newest wave of Bixby Vision AR features shows that the technology entirely. However, Samsung has never really hit the heights it imagined or promised with this technology.
First, it was late releasing as the company claimed it would be ready for the Galaxy S8 series but did not come out until 2017.
Rumours suggest that Samsung may be getting ready to embrace more Google Assistant integrations. However, other rumours suggesting that Samsung may shutter down what’s left of the Bixby dev outreach team now seem to hold more weight.
If Samsung were to get even partially paid off to drop Bixby that probably would not be a bad outcome for the company. It has clearly moved away from focussing on the technology and this could be an easy way out for them.
Whether this comes to pass is another matter but certainly one worth keeping an eye on. However, all we know for certain is that much of Bixby Vision’s AR features will be no more soon enough which is a shame for many.