Routines on Android

Press and hold the Car 2 Home icon on the home screen or in the app drawer. The menu that opens lists the most used actions, such as Start a trip, Stop the trip, Where did I park and Check error codes.

Most of them answer with a quick message on screen and never open the app. The ones that need you, like starting a trip with no vehicle registered, open the right screen instead.

That same menu carries a shortcut that changes on its own: Connect to vehicle when an adapter is saved and the connection is down, and Disconnect while it is up. With no adapter saved it does not appear at all.

Disconnect does more than close the connection: the device stops trying to reconnect by itself until you use Connect to vehicle again. That is what lets you move one Bluetooth adapter between two devices, since an adapter accepts one connection at a time. Turning the system's Bluetooth off does not have the same effect, because the radio comes back and the app resumes trying.

Still in that menu, press and hold the action you use most and drag it onto a free spot on the home screen. The launcher creates a shortcut that fires that action with one tap, without going through the app.

Not every launcher allows pinning shortcuts. When yours does not, the action is still available from the press-and-hold menu and from the paths in the next steps.

In Settings, open Modes and Routines, go to the Routines tab and tap Add, the plus sign.

Tap the sentence under If and choose Bluetooth device, select the car stereo and the Connected condition. Then tap the sentence under Then, choose the category of the action and pick the Car 2 Home action you want to fire.

If your version of One UI does not offer the app's actions in that list, use the intent path in step 6. It works on any Android device.

Outside Samsung, what each manufacturer offers varies quite a bit. Whenever there is a routines app with a Bluetooth trigger, the recipe is the same: trigger Bluetooth connected, pointing at the car stereo, and the Car 2 Home action as the result.

When there is none, or when the action list does not show the app's own, any automation app solves it by sending an intent.

Automation apps reach Car 2 Home's actions by sending an intent. In MacroDroid the action is called Send Intent. In Tasker it has the same name, Send Intent, inside the Misc category.

Always fill in these three fields, with the intent addressed to an Activity:

• Package: ai.car2home
• Class: ai.car2home.ShortcutActionActivity
• Action: the matching line from the table below

The Action field is what picks the action, and it is required. Without it the screen opens and closes doing nothing, which is why a generic launch-an-activity action is not a substitute for sending an intent.

To move an adapter between two devices, the sequence that works is: on the device you are leaving, send com.car2home.SHORTCUT_DISCONNECT, wait a few seconds, and only then send com.car2home.SHORTCUT_CONNECT_CAR on the other one.

Besides the actions, the app accepts intents that open a specific screen. They are the same ones the widgets use, handy when the routine should end with something in front of you instead of a quick message.

The class here is a different one, and the intent also goes to an Activity:

• Package: ai.car2home
• Class: ai.car2home.MainActivity
• Action: the matching line from the table below