Samsung opens up third-party support for the Galaxy Note 9’s BLE S Pen

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The S Pen is the Galaxy Note line’s biggest selling point, so it’s no surprise that it’s the feature that gets improved the most and this year was no different. While the Galaxy Note 8‘s S Pen was pretty capable already, the one included in the Galaxy Note 9 manages to improve on it, featuring things like supercapacitors for ultra quick charging, Bluetooth connection, remote controls, and a lot more. Remote controls are actually an exciting one: while it doesn’t get much more complicated than a button which can be pressed on your S Pen to trigger something, it actually has a series of nifty use cases, such as remotely taking a picture. This “remote control” feature opens up the stylus to a plethora of new possibilities and potential uses. Potential uses which can, now, be explored by third-party apps.

At the Samsung Developer Conference, Samsung announced that they’re opening up support for third-party apps to take advantage of the Note 9’s improved S Pen remote controls. They’ve also published an official SDK for implementing stylus controls and capabilities into your app so that Galaxy Note 9 users can easily take advantage of them. With this, Samsung is expecting that developers implement S Pen remote controls in their apps whenever relevant, also making stylus usage among Note 9 users grow in the process.

Some examples of use cases for the S Pen’s remote controls include a remote shutter for a camera app, media controls for music/video playback, and more. It’s up to developers how they plan to use it, but as we said before, it doesn’t go much further than a remote button in the back of the S Pen.

If you’re interested in bringing S Pen support to your app, you can head over to the official Samsung S Pen Remote documentation.