Use a Switch to open a phone app?

SmartApps & Automations
1

Please point me in the right direction, as my searches have not found what I am trying to do here.

Goal:
When I turn on a virtual switch, I want to open a specific phone app.

Use case:
When I ride my motorcycle, I want to open the app “Bubbler” on my Samsung Note 10+. This app only needs to be opened/launched on the phone, no additional action is required within this app.

Currently, I turn on a virtual switch “Ride” via a voice command to an Echo. Via Core (the OG, not webCore), when the “Ride” switch turns on, it opens the garage door, waits a few minutes then closes the garage door, as well as enables the garage door to open when I return.

Request:
Is there something that I can use to open the Bubbler app when the virtual switch “Ride” is turned on?

2

You can probably use a combination of sharptools and Tasker to do this. Since you have an android phone. (It can’t be done on an iPhone because of built-in security requirements that the human be aware of what the phone is doing.) so you’d need two third-party paid apps, but they give you a lot of power when combined. :sunglasses:

@joshua_lyon , The developer of sharptools, is very active in this forum and should be able to say more.

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3

Thanks JD!

I had already purchased Tasker and started looking into it last night. Just wasn’t sure if I was heading in the right or wrong direction.

Sharptools will be needed to work with Tasker? I haven’t looked at Sharptools yet

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4

Sharp tools is what will give you the smartthings integration. So the control flow is smartthings to sharptools to tasker to bubbler. :sunglasses:

Look down near the bottom of this page for the discussion of the android app.

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5

@joshua_lyon any idea why a virtual switch has no attributes available to subscribe to? The only option is to Unsubscribe.

6

Are you using the official SmartThings supplied ‘Virtual Switch’ device handler?

Would you mind sharing a screenshot of what you are seeing? If you are already subscribed to a particular attribute, then you’ll see a star on the device card in the main SharpTools for Android app and the option in the menu (when long-pressing on the device card) will change from “Subscribe to switch” to “Unsubscribe from switch”.

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One thing to keep in mind is that newer Android versions have become really aggressive with battery management, so you’ll want to make sure you run through all the de-optimizations noted in this article (and the article linked within):

I’d also note that there are a few other approaches to this. For example, I tend to use Pushbullet (or Pushover) for pushing events down to my phone to trigger things. Both of those apps are 100% focused on push events, so they have some tricks up their sleeves to make sure events are reliably pushed to your phone even with all the recent battery restrictions Android has introduced.

Since you’re using CoRE, there’s a Pushbullet DTH and Pushover DTH that I believe would work for you.

Personally, I use the (free) SharpTools.io Rule Engine which has native Pushover and Pushbullet support to push events down to my devices to trigger tasks.

If you go the Pushover/Pushbullet route, you wouldn’t even need the SharpTools Tasker plugins as both Pushover and Pushbullet have native Tasker integrations. (Though if you’re into Tasker and SmartThings, I’m sure you’ll find the SharpTools Tasker plugins useful!)

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