There’s a great selection of powerful tools to automate tasks from your phone, without paying a cent. Here’s a roundup of the best of them.
If you use your Android phone every day, there are probably a lot of repetitive tasks that bore you. From adjusting your screen brightness every night to checking up on your child's location, there are a lot of tasks that consume our time.
Android automation apps offer the promise of getting a lot of tasks done for you while you sit back and forget about them. But what are the automation apps that you can truly trust to get stuff done?
With over 10 million downloads and a 4.7-star rating on Play Store, MacroDroid is popular and highly rated. The Android automation community considers it one of the most powerful and flexible automation apps. With MacroDroid, the list of things you can automate with your phone is almost endless.
The app offers 70 triggers based on location, device status, connectivity, and in-built phone sensors. MacroDroid can react to triggers like geographical location, battery level, or screen brightness. It also has triggers for light level, temperature, and connectivity status of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
MacroDroid also offers 100 programmable actions. Combined with triggers, you can do everything from playing custom sound alerts for your work email to having the app tweet on your behalf.
Although the app contains ads, they are subtle, and you'll barely notice them. It has a friendly learning curve, and you can further extend its functionality with plugins. It is one of the most powerful and flexible free automation tools for Android.
Download: MacroDroid for Android (Free, subscription available)
Automate is another highly flexible automation app offering loads of options. With over 350 predefined building blocks, Automate can handle the bulk of actions you can perform on your Android smartphone.
Automate takes a different approach from other automation apps like Tasker and MacroDroid. To program an automated routine, you'll need to follow a logical flow chart sequence. The visual representation of the automation process as flow charts makes it easier to understand. It is fairly beginner-friendly for an automation app of its complexity.
If you need a powerful automation tool with a friendly learning curve, Automate is the tool. There’s a strong Reddit and Google Groups community you can run to whenever you hit a bottleneck with the app.
Automate is ad-free and, just like MacroDroid, you can extend its functionality using plugins.
Download: Automate for Android (Free, subscription available)
AutomateIt is yet another powerful automation app for Android users. Despite the similarity in name, the app is nothing like Automate, in either UI or UX design. However, it does quite a lot of things you'd expect an automation app to do, plus a few more.
Unfortunately, the app has some minor stability and compatibility issues. As a result, it works like clockwork on some devices and Android OS versions, but it suffers from annoying technical glitches on others. The app features ads, but they aren't intrusive.
Although the app is reasonably popular, customer support is slow and sometimes nonexistent. It might not be the most complex automation app around, but it is not an ideal option for beginners.
If you're wondering why it made this list, the app still packs significant punching power. If you're experienced with Android automation and crave some good automation challenges, you'll find AutomateIt to be very useful. The weather and activity triggers are super exciting. Using them, you can program your Android smartphone to take action if it detects you entering a car, bicycling, trekking, or standing still. The weather triggers let you create reminder alerts to, for example, park your car in the shade if the weather hits 30 °C on a sunny day. There are a lot of exciting things you can do.
Download: AutomateIt for Android (Free, subscription available)
There's one word to describe IFTTT: massive! It is a feature-packed app with so much functionality that it’s difficult to keep track of. The best way to picture IFTTT is as an Android automation app that has tons of features you didn't even know you needed.
IFTTT gives you a god-like control over your Android apps. Without moving a finger, you can get IFTTT to download any picture on Facebook posts that you're tagged in, the moment you're tagged. You can get IFTTT to automatically send those pictures to a contact on Telegram or email them to a coworker. Or you can even automatically post them on Twitter. IFTTT's power is in its amazing collection of powerful applets, which are predefined automation routines.
Using applets, you can program complex automation routines with just a few clicks. Apart from helping you automate tasks on your Android phone, IFTTT can serve as a bridge between your smartphone and smart home devices. You can use it to control smart bulbs, smart thermostats, smart doorbells, and dozens of other smart home products.
Unfortunately, for all its good sides, IFTTT hides its most useful features behind a subscription plan. The free version gives you access to a very limited amount of applets while teasing you with juicy features you'd have to pay for. The free plan clearly intends to get you over to the paid plan. Also, the basic subscription model still comes with limitations that you can only overcome by paying even more for the Pro+ version. Subscription issues aside, however, IFTTT is an excellent option.
Download: IFTTT for Android (Free, subscription available)
aProfiles' greatest selling point is its simplicity. Compared to other automation apps like MacroDroid and IFTTT, aProfiles is significantly easier to use. aProfiles groups actions into profiles that it activates once a rule is met.
For instance, you can define profile A as setting the volume level to 34, the screen brightness to 43, and Wi-Fi enabled. You could define a second profile, B, with volume level at 60, screen brightness at 78, and Bluetooth off.
Whenever a condition is met, any of the designated profiles will kick in and the app will alter your phone settings to reflect its definition. Although this approach to automation makes the use of the app simple, it comes with a lot of limitations.
The app is the least granular in functionality of all the apps on our list. The free version can not handle complex automation conditions. The app also contains ads, but they're not intrusive.
On the positive end, aProfiles has a good failsafe. It features a restore action feature that can return your phone to its previous state should you break critical settings on your device. aProfiles also has a log feature that keeps a record of all changes it makes to your device. This can be very useful in retracing your steps whenever something goes wrong.
Download: aProfile for Android (Free, subscription available)
Apart from automating a countless number of Android tasks, automation apps can do much more. They can perform functions you'd typically need a premium app for, at no cost. They can also reduce the need to fill up your phone with a lot of apps.
With MacroDroid for instance, you can make your own custom app locks, alarm apps, and phone temperature monitors. This eliminates the need to download standalone apps that perform those individual tasks.
Maxwell is a loyal Android fan who writes on a wide range of Android topics for MakeUseOf. He’s been writing about tech innovations for 8 years. When’s he’s not neck-deep in exploring the latest tech innovations, he’s probably seeing a TV show.
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