Tasker. Basically an interface for writing scripts for your phone. Even if you don't have a use case in the beginning you'll start finding things to do with it.
this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2024
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I used it to identify the cell towers near my home and turn wifi off when I was out of their range and back on when I was in range. It seemed to help save battery by not constantly looking for wifi networks and I didn't have to remember to turn it off and on manually.
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I used tasker to display an icon on my status bar to tell me whether auto rotate is enabled or not. I kept lying down on my side forgetting that I had auto rotate on and my display would rotate when I didn't want it to.
It's an incredibly specific and minor thing that was annoying me, but tasker let me fix it. It's a great tool, but can be complicated if you aren't familiar with scripting. Luckily it's got some presets and a "basic" mode.
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What are some things you use it for if you don't mind my asking?
Lots of things
- Change my ringtone based on time/location
- Silence phone if my calendar has the word meet or meeting
- Parse a local news website and read the headlines to me after I dismiss my morning alarm
- Set up car mode if it is plugged in and connected to my car's Bluetooth
- Turn on WiFi based on location
- etc
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The main thing is a script to stop any media playing and turn off the screen after x minutes, so I can fall asleep watching YouTube or listening to something. There's probably already an app for that but this is pretty customizable.
Another stupid use is putting the phone on silent while using the camera app because Samsung won't let you turn off the camera shutter sound.
I've got some that pulls the picture from Bing and the picture from NASA and set them to my wall paper and lock screen back grounds.
I've got another one that silences my phone when I'm at work or church and not connected to my car blue tooth. I used something similar in college to silence my phone when a calendar event was happening. My phone never made a peep during a lecture! It resets volumes to normal levels after the silent period is done.
I used to get up at 5am and had to get ready for work in the dark so I didn't wake my family. I'm a klutz and fumbling with my phone's flashlight constantly just got annoying.
I ended up making a little script so that between 5am and 5:30, shaking the phone turned the flashlight on. After 5:30 the sensor turns off to save battery, since I didn't really need it at that point.
You can do all kinds of handy little things like that
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Balatro
I think my cousin told me he really likes this game. Is it really worth the price?
Yes
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Sleep as Android
It's just a really great alarm clock app, but with tons of other sleep tracking functionality. I've always had trouble sleeping through my alarms, but I never do with this.
If you run Home Assistant, Sleep as Android can publish events to an MQTT broker so you can create automations based on those events, like "smart_period", "awake", "not_awake", "alarm_alert_smart", etc.
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I use Paprika 3 extensively.
I find recipes online, download them to the app stripped of all the online recipe bloat. It sorts all the information automatically, including notes and nutritional info. I can check off ingredients and highlight directions, edit tags, compile menus, add my own notes and write my own recipes, it automatically provides a grocery checklist, has a serving calculator to adjust amounts for whole recipes, built in timers, and that's just the basics off the top of my head.
It's free up to a certain amount of storage but I think all the features are available.
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Torque and a $5 BT car computer dongle. It tells you everything about your car. You can see what warning lights mean and clear the codes.
What are the main things you use it for? All I ever do is change tires and oil. Both my cars are old, but have never broken down.
I'm not the person you replied to, but it's great for telling you why the check engine light is on. If you're somewhere that requires emission testing: you can diagnose if you have an exhaust leak, bad O2 sensor, clogged catalytic converter, etc. Besides that: its good just to know if the check engine light can be safely ignored.
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To oversimplify, your car maintains a list of faults, and if that list isn't empty, it'll turn on the check engine light. An obd2 code reader let's you see those codes. I can vouch that these Bluetooth readers + torque are the cheapest way to get these codes without going to a parts store. Even if you have no intention of doing your own work on your car, it's good to have an idea what the problem is so your mechanic doesn't rip you off.
They generally only return obd2 codes though, which are required by law for emissions. Many automakers keep extra, proprietary codes that require expensive, proprietary tools to read.
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Slice and Dice is a very entertaining one time buy game. No bullshit in game purchases, no ads, I think developed by a singular guy.
Slay the spire, balatro and Peglin also fit here.
Amazing indie games, all one time buys.
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Symfonium is an awesome music player that's a one-time $5 purchase.
Great question, btw.
It was the first (only?) app where I was baffled at the features compared to the price. It's a joy to use. If you self-host music, it beats the competition by miles
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Fair Email. I grabbed it from F Droid and paid direct though.
Stardew Valley
I love Simple Audiobook Player+. The UI is super minimal (and really maxes out the whole OLED black thing if you choose it) without compromising on features that are kind of essential for audiobooks (e.g. delayed pause/sleep timers, speed settings, volume boosting, an EQ). My favorite thing is the "undo seek" button. I'm an oaf who is constantly inputting accidental touches. When I was using Audible, I'd have to manually find where I was after accidentally hitting the next chapter button or moving the dot on the progress bar. SABP lets me just undo that shit.
It hasn't been updated in a while, but it doesn't need updating when it does its job so well. There are no ads, no marketing notifications, just books. It's like a program from coreutils in app form. It might be a bit ugly or outdated looking, but I'm about that.
Smart audiobook player is great, but I do wish we had an open source alternative. The audiobookshelf app is almost there, but it still requires a self-hosted server I believe.
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Monument Valley. Got the first one for free during a promotion but loved it enough to pay for the sequel and extra levels.
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Read Era is technically free, but I paid for premium years ago and have never regretted it. I can open any kind of uncorrupted book file, from the Amazon reader format to PDF to epub, and everything else I've ever come across. It has a great search function, and the ability to file a book into a custom 'Collection'. You can edit the details of a book, like adding Author or pusblisher info, add your own personal notes to a page or highlighted quote, see an aggregate of all your highlights in a particular file, and adjust the font, background color, and contrast to your hearts content.
I make my whole family use it now, cause I love it so much and Premium works on Family share.
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Smart audiobook player, fit notes. That's all I got and they're kind of niche
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MiXplorer: Tabbed file explorer with many features. You can get it for free from their website, but it's available paid on Google Play.
Symfonium: Music player compatible with many backends, such as local storage, WebDAV, Subsonic (which includes Ampache, Navidrome)
aCalendar+: Calendar app with many widgets. Best part is the persistent notification, which shows what's happening today, and will happen tomorrow.
Cryptomator: Cross-platform file encryption program, also open source.
Buzzkill is good if you have one of those
Annoying friends who
Send multiple messages instead of just one, Jonny, you annoying cunt
Solid Explorer
Macrodroid. It is like Tasker, but with a much much better UI.
just scrolling trough my phone, here's some I like
app opps - lets you change permissions for apps, handy if you want to have multiple things playing audio or use google photos without it scanning your phone.
calcu - it's a calculator!
simple draw - exactly what it says on the tin
es file explorer pro - versatile, but not bloated
moon+ reader pro - a handy reader for all sorts of docs, including search etc
polarr - a photo editing app with features not a lot of apps have. The devs are pushing some dumb filters tho
handy photo - same as polarr
mx player pro - got videos to play?
poweramp - a music player
poweramp equalizer - is what it says on the tin
sd maid pro - for clearing out old files and such
poweraudio plus - used to be the only app with a parametric equalizer. Now poweramp does too
ultrachron - just a nice timer/stopwatch
unified remote - a remote control app, be careful tho, I doubt this thing is secure
web video caster - also downloads videos from plenty of places
and a couple more apps, where the developer has decided to pull the lifetime license and move to a subscription, even after I had bought it
officesuite pro - it's handy, but f them
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Others have recommended other file explorers, but I use FX and rather like it.
Just to mention another file explorer, Solid Explorer is great especially becase it's easy to access Google Drive without having to use the Google drive interface.
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HiPER Calc Pro. A great scientific calculator I use constantly. (There is also a unpaid, ad-supported version, and the ads weren't too intrusive the last time I tried it)
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Cryptomator is a fantastic way to securely upload your stuff to cloud storage providers like Google Drive, OneDrive, etc. In my case, I use it to have an encrypted blob of my stuff with me on a drive when I'm out and about.
They also give you the ability to purchase a license independent of Google Play if you didn't want Google to get a cut.
Power amp music player
- Password Safe Pro
- My Expenses
- FL Studio, formerly Fruity Loops (also: Desktop)
- Threema
- Through the Ages (boardgame adaption)
Otherwise, I usually prefer free open source solutions (FDroid), but I regularly donate to keep the projects alive. 1 and 2 are small dev studios that I am happy to support.
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