I did a post about a week back on a nap timer for Android, and ‘tom s’ on Friendica suggested I have a look at MacroDroid. Even though I had found a solution for the nap timer, I was pretty impressed with MacroDroid and have been delving a lot further into it.
Tasker is the absolute kitchen sink of automation utilities. Very powerful, but also a bit complex. MacroDroid is really offering most of the same but ina way more friendly and intuitive interface. Everything is clearly separated by colour into zones for triggers, actions, and constraints. You can get going with the fairly simple stuff, very quickly. But you can still build some pretty good macros from there.
But there’s more… they have masses of 3rd party plugins that you can select to further expand functionality, which extends to even directly using Tasker plugins. Then they also have a quick way of listing community templates for macros that you can just export into your app and customise them for your own use.
Some typical macros I’m already using:
- When screen turns on during the day, and the outside light is over 6k lux, then push screen brightness quickly to 80%.
- On any failed login attempt, take a photo with the selfie camera, and save it to phone’s gallery.
- When leaving the house, activate the hotspot mode on the phone. When returning, deactivate hotspot mode and reactivate the WiFi.
- Nap timer activates DND mode for a user inputted number of minutes, and then sounds a notification to wake up, and deactivates DND mode.
The app is free to use for up to 5 macros, or has a once-off cost of around $5 to unlock premium with no ads and unlimited macros.
The video at the link below gives a quick and high level overview of how it works.
Watch https://youtu.be/8YL9cWCykKc
#technology #android #macrodroid #tasker #automation