How to Automate Tasks and Fun Stuff on Android: A Step-by-Step Guide

If you're looking to automate tasks on your Android device, you've come to the right place. In this article, we'll walk you through the process of creating a flowchart using the Google Drive automation app.

First things first, let's talk about the Google Drive automation app. This app allows you to create custom flows that can automate various tasks on your device. With the app, you can create flows that can be used to upload files from one location to another, send notifications, and even perform complex tasks like editing photos using Snapseed.

To get started with the Google Drive automation app, open the app and tap on the "+" icon at the top right corner of the screen. This will bring up a blank flowchart where you can start creating your custom flow.

Now, let's talk about the different parts of the flowchart. The first part is the "Start" module. This is where we want to begin our flow, so we'll tap on the "dot" in the center of the G Drive module to indicate that after the flow starts, we want to go into the beginning of the G Drive action.

Next, we need to specify the Google account we want to use for the Google Drive actions. Tap on your Google account name and select the one you want to use. In our case, we'll be using a Google account named "My Google Account".

Now that we've selected our Google account, let's move on to the next part of the flowchart. The second module is the "local path" field, where we specify the location of the files or folders we want to upload to Google Drive. In this case, we'll be uploading photos from a folder named "Snapseed".

Tap on the "local path" field and navigate to the Snapseed folder. This will allow us to select the specific folder where our photos are stored.

Once you've selected the local path, tap "OK". This will bring up another field called "remote path", which is the location of the files or folders we want to upload to Google Drive. In this case, we'll be uploading all of the photos in the Snapseed folder to a subfolder named "business/photos/automate".

Tap on the "remote path" field and select the correct folder structure. You can also use the "recursive" option to upload all files within that folder, as well as its subfolders.

Next, we need to specify what should happen after the file is uploaded. In this case, we want to delete any duplicates of the original file. To do this, tap on the "update now" field and select the "copy new files only" option.

This will ensure that our flow doesn't re-upload the same file multiple times, causing unnecessary duplicates. Now that we've specified what should happen after the file is uploaded, let's move on to the next part of the flowchart.

The next module is the "Show for example" field, which allows us to display a message or notification when the task is completed successfully. In this case, we'll be displaying a toast message with the text "Backup complete".

Tap on the "Show for example" field and select the "Toast" option. This will bring up another field called "Show", where you can customize the appearance of your toast message.

For now, let's leave the settings as is and tap "Done". Now that we've completed the "Start" module, it's time to move on to the next part of the flowchart.

Tap on the "OK" button at the bottom right corner of the screen to save any changes you made. This will bring up a new section of the flowchart where we can add more modules and actions.

Let's take a look at the updated flowchart. As you can see, we've added a few more modules, including a "Toast" node that displays our custom message when the task is completed successfully.

Now that we've completed all of the necessary modules, let's tap on the "Checkmark" icon at the top right corner of the screen to save the flowchart. This will bring up a confirmation prompt where you can review your flow and make any final changes before saving it.

Once you're happy with your flow, tap "Save" to complete the process. Your new flow will now be saved to your Google Drive account, ready for use whenever you need it.

In addition to creating custom flows, the Google Drive automation app also allows you to share your flows with others. To do this, simply select the "Share" icon at the top right corner of the screen and enter the email address of anyone you want to share the flow with.

You can also set permissions for who can access your shared flow, so be sure to use this feature wisely! With these tips and tricks, you'll be automating tasks on your Android device in no time.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso in a recent tips and tricks' tuesday i did a video on how you could automate things in iOS on your iphone and a bunch of you asked if there was a similar way to automate android so i looked into it and it turns out there are a crap ton of automation apps in the Android Play Store now one of those popular ones is called Tasker and it's $2.99 in the Play Store but I think I might have found a better one for people just starting out now in this tutorial I'm gonna show you how to use the aptly named automate app on Android but the concept is the same with pretty much all of them so you can follow along with this tutorial and then by the time you're done you'll at least understand the ins and outs of how these type of automation apps work and then you can kind of use any of the other ones as well with a little bit more knowledge on how they work etc I'll leave a link below to all of the most popular ones though in case you guys want to try those out instead now the reason I went with this particular app is because one it's free and two it has a flow chart based UI which I just think is gonna be a lot easier for people that are just starting out to understand it's also even for advanced people just a little more intuitive now says you use blocks and arrows that make it a lot easier to visualize what each task does when the next one is triggered etc now on top of that like I mentioned it is free at least there is a free version that you can message before you buy the premium version the only turbot wean the free and the premium is the premium allows you to add more of these blocks over 30 but that's plenty for most things you're gonna try to do anyway okay let's not get ahead of ourselves though and let's just start with downloading the app to do that head to the Play Store search for and install automate you know it's the right one if it's from Aleman labs now you can either check out one of the ones that they've already created for you to get an idea of how it all works or you can tap the plus sign at the top to get a new automation going notice you know there are a couple of terms that we need to know about before we get started first up is flow now this is the term that they basis is use for each of your automations then we have building blocks now these are what make up each flow each one contains an action whether that's to copy some text as the user for input etc you can chain these together and they make up your flow finally now this is a term for the process of running through a flow so you make a flow and when you run it a fiber is started that runs through the flow until the end now you don't really know there's too much but you're gonna see it throughout the app and it's important to know just because as you get more advanced with these automations you'll be able to fork the fiber and have it go from one flow to another one have it do multiple things at the same time and a bunch of other super cool but more complex things you don't need to know right now but just need to be aware of the term and that it exists then we have output variables now these are data that you want to go from one building block to another a lot of times you will need this but if you do you're just gonna give it a name and then choose that variable name from the next block that you might need it for example you might want to get a location datum and for example save the latitude as lat and the longitude as long and then in the next step check those variables to see where you are and then use that to determine an action now if you want you can always go to their site and when you're done with this video I suggest you do to check out their documentation on their website to figure out what each of these modules does but basically I'm gonna give you a quick overview of how to make one thing so you get an idea of how the app works in general and then as you need to use modules you can just kind of look them up and then once you understand what they do in the future you'll know how to continue using them and what all of the little fields do etc on this automation I'm gonna show you how to automatically back up all of these Snapseed edited photos to your Google Drive okay now whenever you create an automation regardless what it is you'll start with a flow beginning node that you can tap to adjust the settings now the settings in here are for the flow as a whole so for example the title this is whatever you want to name it parallel launch which allows the flow to be launched multiple times yeah so for example you can run it and while it's running tap it again to have it run again but just starting out you could just leave this unchecked same thing goes for hidden this just hides the node from the list of starting points again we're just starting out leave this install a homescreen shortcut so this will obviously create a home screen shortcut that you could tap to launch this flow if you want for example I'm actually going to do that for this one but you could also launch directly from within the automate app instead now we have output variables now this is more advanced stuff so you can check this out later but for example the payload is a way of carrying a piece of information that can get altered along the entire flow and then maybe come out of something different at the end the fiber URI is an identifier for a new fiber like we talked about before etc again don't really need to know what these do at the moment but there's something you can look up down the road if you want to try to get a little more advanced then we have the flow URI now this is just a unique identifier for this flow and it's automatically general by the app so you can just use it if you want other flows to call on this one in some way when they're done again more advanced just leave it the way it is but just so you know what it is next we can dive into the plethora of building blocks as they're called I'm gonna show you a very basic one but with Android even more so than iOS there is a crazy number of things you could do here so you'll have to just explore it after you get comfortable to basics from this tutorial but I get to the blocks tap at the top left to bring out all of the options for this I'm going to grab the upload G Drive module now the easiest method is to try and search for keywords and what you're trying to do at the top so for example I'm gonna type in Drive and then all of the things the word Drive will come up or you can also just use the categories that they have here to find it know once we find it we can tap it to insert it into our flow you'll notice that nothing is connected though so we're gonna tap and hold on the ok down at the end of the flow beginning node and then drag it down to the in dot of the G Drive module to indicate that after the flow starts we want to go into the beginning of the G Drive action then we're gonna tap on the G Drive block and do the following in their respective fields so for the Google account I'm gonna select my Google account which is the one that we want the Google Drive to work with then local path this is where to grab the files or in this case photos from for example I'm gonna navigate to the Snapseed folder which is where I know that Snapseed saves all of the edited photos and then tap ok remote path this is the path on our actual Google Drive we want the files to go once uploaded it would be nice if this you could tap in it would just have a GUI to have you select one but it doesn't so for me I know that there's a business folder and inside that there's a photos folder and then I've created an automate foreword for this demo so I'm gonna do slash business / photos / automate the same way you would any other file structure unlike a computer recursively in this case I wanted to upload all of the photos in that folder so I'm gonna select this by the way it would also upload other folders within that folder if there were any if you check this and then update now this will have it only copy new files after the original upload and stop it from just re uploading everything every time I push the button and causing a bunch of duplicates so for me I want that for this example as well and then we want some sort of notification to let us know that it was successful so we'll search in the building blocks again for show for example and use the toast show option to display a small message that it was completed now after it's placed in the flow tap and hold on the okay dog of the Google Drive node and dragged that to the end of the toast node just like we did with the beginning module in Google Drive and then it'll run once the drive upload is completed successfully then we're going to tap the toast show node and just put backup complete in the message to display and then select long or short for how long it'll be on the screen and tap Done now once we're done with the flow we can tap the checkmark at the top right to save it the arrow to the left will undo whatever you last did by the way okay then we're going to tap untitled at the top of the flow info screen and give it a name and then if you tap the pencil icon at the very top you can then tap flowchart and that brings us back to our flow chart in case you want to alter it in some way and of course you at the check mark to go back then under privileges at the bottom any type of privileges that it needs to in order to complete this task it's going to have listed here you need to check each of them off and then tap okay when the phone prompts you for the actual permission you'll only have to do this the first time after that it will have permissions I'm gonna be able to run can I have already uploaded all of my Snapseed pictures that were in that folder and now we're going to edit a new image in the Snapseed and then save that and now we can either run it from this screen in automate or we can use the home screen icon that we created earlier and then it'll only upload the one that we just created because that's new so then when it says it worked we can open Google Drive and having it to the folder reset and see if it has the new photo in it if it's there it worked there you go guys how to automate tasks and things and fun stuff on Android I could have gone a lot more into this but it taking so much more time but I think that kind of gives you a basic understanding of how this works again once you kind of do this once and you're kind of familiar a little bit with the app at least you can easily go to their website and check out their documentation and then kind of just like put them in there and go oh okay I don't know what that field does let me look up that note in the documentation oh that's what it does okay let me put it in you can also tap the FX button next to any of those fields by the way to put in your own expressions if you know what those are then you can use them and that's also how you get variables as well just so you but that's it hope you guys enjoyed that if you did please thumbs up better share it greatly appreciate it if you want more videos like this please share the rest of my channel if you like what you see there please subscribe and also don't forget to tap the bell next the word subscribe so you get notified when I do new videos as always though regardless thanks for watchingso in a recent tips and tricks' tuesday i did a video on how you could automate things in iOS on your iphone and a bunch of you asked if there was a similar way to automate android so i looked into it and it turns out there are a crap ton of automation apps in the Android Play Store now one of those popular ones is called Tasker and it's $2.99 in the Play Store but I think I might have found a better one for people just starting out now in this tutorial I'm gonna show you how to use the aptly named automate app on Android but the concept is the same with pretty much all of them so you can follow along with this tutorial and then by the time you're done you'll at least understand the ins and outs of how these type of automation apps work and then you can kind of use any of the other ones as well with a little bit more knowledge on how they work etc I'll leave a link below to all of the most popular ones though in case you guys want to try those out instead now the reason I went with this particular app is because one it's free and two it has a flow chart based UI which I just think is gonna be a lot easier for people that are just starting out to understand it's also even for advanced people just a little more intuitive now says you use blocks and arrows that make it a lot easier to visualize what each task does when the next one is triggered etc now on top of that like I mentioned it is free at least there is a free version that you can message before you buy the premium version the only turbot wean the free and the premium is the premium allows you to add more of these blocks over 30 but that's plenty for most things you're gonna try to do anyway okay let's not get ahead of ourselves though and let's just start with downloading the app to do that head to the Play Store search for and install automate you know it's the right one if it's from Aleman labs now you can either check out one of the ones that they've already created for you to get an idea of how it all works or you can tap the plus sign at the top to get a new automation going notice you know there are a couple of terms that we need to know about before we get started first up is flow now this is the term that they basis is use for each of your automations then we have building blocks now these are what make up each flow each one contains an action whether that's to copy some text as the user for input etc you can chain these together and they make up your flow finally now this is a term for the process of running through a flow so you make a flow and when you run it a fiber is started that runs through the flow until the end now you don't really know there's too much but you're gonna see it throughout the app and it's important to know just because as you get more advanced with these automations you'll be able to fork the fiber and have it go from one flow to another one have it do multiple things at the same time and a bunch of other super cool but more complex things you don't need to know right now but just need to be aware of the term and that it exists then we have output variables now these are data that you want to go from one building block to another a lot of times you will need this but if you do you're just gonna give it a name and then choose that variable name from the next block that you might need it for example you might want to get a location datum and for example save the latitude as lat and the longitude as long and then in the next step check those variables to see where you are and then use that to determine an action now if you want you can always go to their site and when you're done with this video I suggest you do to check out their documentation on their website to figure out what each of these modules does but basically I'm gonna give you a quick overview of how to make one thing so you get an idea of how the app works in general and then as you need to use modules you can just kind of look them up and then once you understand what they do in the future you'll know how to continue using them and what all of the little fields do etc on this automation I'm gonna show you how to automatically back up all of these Snapseed edited photos to your Google Drive okay now whenever you create an automation regardless what it is you'll start with a flow beginning node that you can tap to adjust the settings now the settings in here are for the flow as a whole so for example the title this is whatever you want to name it parallel launch which allows the flow to be launched multiple times yeah so for example you can run it and while it's running tap it again to have it run again but just starting out you could just leave this unchecked same thing goes for hidden this just hides the node from the list of starting points again we're just starting out leave this install a homescreen shortcut so this will obviously create a home screen shortcut that you could tap to launch this flow if you want for example I'm actually going to do that for this one but you could also launch directly from within the automate app instead now we have output variables now this is more advanced stuff so you can check this out later but for example the payload is a way of carrying a piece of information that can get altered along the entire flow and then maybe come out of something different at the end the fiber URI is an identifier for a new fiber like we talked about before etc again don't really need to know what these do at the moment but there's something you can look up down the road if you want to try to get a little more advanced then we have the flow URI now this is just a unique identifier for this flow and it's automatically general by the app so you can just use it if you want other flows to call on this one in some way when they're done again more advanced just leave it the way it is but just so you know what it is next we can dive into the plethora of building blocks as they're called I'm gonna show you a very basic one but with Android even more so than iOS there is a crazy number of things you could do here so you'll have to just explore it after you get comfortable to basics from this tutorial but I get to the blocks tap at the top left to bring out all of the options for this I'm going to grab the upload G Drive module now the easiest method is to try and search for keywords and what you're trying to do at the top so for example I'm gonna type in Drive and then all of the things the word Drive will come up or you can also just use the categories that they have here to find it know once we find it we can tap it to insert it into our flow you'll notice that nothing is connected though so we're gonna tap and hold on the ok down at the end of the flow beginning node and then drag it down to the in dot of the G Drive module to indicate that after the flow starts we want to go into the beginning of the G Drive action then we're gonna tap on the G Drive block and do the following in their respective fields so for the Google account I'm gonna select my Google account which is the one that we want the Google Drive to work with then local path this is where to grab the files or in this case photos from for example I'm gonna navigate to the Snapseed folder which is where I know that Snapseed saves all of the edited photos and then tap ok remote path this is the path on our actual Google Drive we want the files to go once uploaded it would be nice if this you could tap in it would just have a GUI to have you select one but it doesn't so for me I know that there's a business folder and inside that there's a photos folder and then I've created an automate foreword for this demo so I'm gonna do slash business / photos / automate the same way you would any other file structure unlike a computer recursively in this case I wanted to upload all of the photos in that folder so I'm gonna select this by the way it would also upload other folders within that folder if there were any if you check this and then update now this will have it only copy new files after the original upload and stop it from just re uploading everything every time I push the button and causing a bunch of duplicates so for me I want that for this example as well and then we want some sort of notification to let us know that it was successful so we'll search in the building blocks again for show for example and use the toast show option to display a small message that it was completed now after it's placed in the flow tap and hold on the okay dog of the Google Drive node and dragged that to the end of the toast node just like we did with the beginning module in Google Drive and then it'll run once the drive upload is completed successfully then we're going to tap the toast show node and just put backup complete in the message to display and then select long or short for how long it'll be on the screen and tap Done now once we're done with the flow we can tap the checkmark at the top right to save it the arrow to the left will undo whatever you last did by the way okay then we're going to tap untitled at the top of the flow info screen and give it a name and then if you tap the pencil icon at the very top you can then tap flowchart and that brings us back to our flow chart in case you want to alter it in some way and of course you at the check mark to go back then under privileges at the bottom any type of privileges that it needs to in order to complete this task it's going to have listed here you need to check each of them off and then tap okay when the phone prompts you for the actual permission you'll only have to do this the first time after that it will have permissions I'm gonna be able to run can I have already uploaded all of my Snapseed pictures that were in that folder and now we're going to edit a new image in the Snapseed and then save that and now we can either run it from this screen in automate or we can use the home screen icon that we created earlier and then it'll only upload the one that we just created because that's new so then when it says it worked we can open Google Drive and having it to the folder reset and see if it has the new photo in it if it's there it worked there you go guys how to automate tasks and things and fun stuff on Android I could have gone a lot more into this but it taking so much more time but I think that kind of gives you a basic understanding of how this works again once you kind of do this once and you're kind of familiar a little bit with the app at least you can easily go to their website and check out their documentation and then kind of just like put them in there and go oh okay I don't know what that field does let me look up that note in the documentation oh that's what it does okay let me put it in you can also tap the FX button next to any of those fields by the way to put in your own expressions if you know what those are then you can use them and that's also how you get variables as well just so you but that's it hope you guys enjoyed that if you did please thumbs up better share it greatly appreciate it if you want more videos like this please share the rest of my channel if you like what you see there please subscribe and also don't forget to tap the bell next the word subscribe so you get notified when I do new videos as always though regardless thanks for watching\n"