18
votes
Phone automation - Share your workflows!
I recently switched operating systems on my phone and lost some of the automated workflows I had during the transition. While I've rebuilt some of it, but it sometimes feels like I'm missing something or that I could do more, I just don't know what exactly. I'd like to hear from others here and see if they can inspire me to implement what works for them. I'm using an android phone with automate and here's the workflows that I got:
- When plugging in the phone, set it to do not disturb and enable Bluetooth. This is for when I go to sleep so that I don't get woken up by notifications and I can listen to podcasts on my headband.
- If at work (Based on cell towers, not GPS) set phone to vibrate, when leaving it set it to ring. I actually lost this one but haven't rebuilt it since I've not been to the office in a while.
- Learn location. For a set time, grabs the cell towers around and stores them in a JSON file.
What kind of automation have you implemented on your phone?
I used Tasker for much the same, although I'll be checking out automate now because cell tower location sounds way easier on battery.
When connecting headphones, adjust volume to preferred level and launch music player.
When at the train station on a weekday evening, notify my wife that I'm walking home. After that automation fired, unlock door when about a block away.
Change thermostat based on distance from home (if > 20 miles, wait until < 20 miles to start returning to normal)
Turn on wifi when at home, otherwise turn off.
When I got a two-factor text I used a lot, read out the numbers so I didn't have to transcribe.
I am curious to see what others have come up with, because very lettle else I experimented with stuck.
Tasker should be able to do that as well, unless Automate does it in a different way.
Your phone doesn't do that as standard? I thought Android stored headphone volumes separately from speaker volume.
I don't have anything to share but I do have a question: does anyone know of a similar app but available on F-Droid? Thanks
I saw Easer on F-Droid while browsing for random stuff, but haven't used it.
I just switched to iOS from android. I used to have a decent collection of tasker tasks. My most used one allowed me to activate it with google assistant and started sleep tracking and a podcast on my phone.
On iOS, shortcuts is a surprisingly adequate replacement for tasker, especially when it comes to activating things with the voice assistant. Unfortunately, my bedtime task, which otherwise would have been better than my one on tasker, does not work. I have a program running on my nas that allows me to airplay to cast devices. This works great, except that changing the airplay target through shortcuts fails for any of these devices.
Man i love that app, it's a sleeping giant underdog imo in terms of capability and ease of use.
I just wrote a massive ranting thing about all the stuff I made with it, but then realised none of them are on this phone (and I'm so rusty I failed at recreating them 1:1) so I'll cut the comment back a bit.
I mostly had QoL stuff which I seemed to ignore most days. If I left the house i'd go into "outside mode" and would display a little reminder thing every other time I unlocked my phone. For example 'take the long way through the park' or 'how are the bees doing'. little things like that went a long way for my anxiety because I'm never going to "decide" to just go take a walk, or go look at flowers or whatever. And when you're in mission mode getting chores done, its too easy to forget you wanted to do those things in the first place.
There was some app-specific "await assistance.." things too, one of them was basically a definable autoclicker/macro thing I used to try and learn that side of automate. Wound up only using it to scroll through reddit and other things handsfree. Still idly looking for a way to detect audio/content still being played so it doesn't move on without you. Or maybe just clicking the play/pause headset button to swipe would be a good compromise. But either way it's not that useful, I'm just impressed automate can do it haha
Most of the time this app goes unused, but I absolutely love the malleability of it. My general advice for it is to just make some stuff in it just for fun FIRST, not to solve a niche. Because you'll wind up with a much better idea on how to attempt what you have in mind afterwards.
I use Button Mapper Pro to open my phone's email client set up to send an email to myself when I squeeze the phone (this is Pixel 4's Active Edge feature). It's good enough of a substitute for pen and paper for quickly writing something down.
I'll include the Button Mapper configuration here, as I had to look things up to make it work:
android.intent.action.SENDTOmailto:my-email@domain.name?subject=Note to self:I use Tasker to toggle auto-rotate whenever I'm using my gallery app or Google photos.
It's not exactly phone automation but I use IFTTT to make an archive playlist of all the songs from my Spotify Discover Weekly and Release radar playlists. It does miss one or two songs every week though and I don't really care enough to find out why.
I'd like to automate more but I never find any ideas that I think is useful. I used to set my phone to turn off wifi whenever I left home but that just meant I had to turn it back on if I went somewhere with free wifi and the battery benefits of having it off weren't worth it to me.