u/CennoxX

Two months ago I introduced WidgetRelay, a Tasker plugin for reading and interacting with Android widgets.

https://imgur.com/OUS0EcO

What does WidgetRelay?

Some apps expose useful information or controls only through a widget. WidgetRelay gives Tasker access to those widgets, without adding them to your home screen:

• Read values from widgets into a Tasker variable.
• Click widget elements by path, visible text, or regular expressions.
• React when a widget or selected element changes.
• Read an entire widget as JSON.

https://imgur.com/a/FNOjEDI

What’s new in version 2.0?

The main new feature is the Widget Updated Tasker event. It lets Tasker react when a widget, or a selected element, changes instead of repeatedly running Tasker actions. You could use it to react on status, unread count, or other widget value changes.

The Tasker actions have also been made more flexible. Widget elements can now be selected by their path, visible text, or a regular expression. So you could for example get the value that ends on °F with the regular expression /°F$/. Tasks can additionally pause or resume monitoring and control the CPU wake lock. Version 2.0 also improves reliability, including better recovery widget bindings are lost.

Help testing

Google Play requires a testing phase before public release. I’d appreciate it if a few of you could help test it.

1. Join the WidgetRelay Google Group.
2. Wait 5-10 minutes
3. Using the same Google account, open the Google Play testing link.
4. Choose Become a tester and install WidgetRelay from Google Play.

If you previously installed a version manually or from GitHub, you need to uninstall it first and may have to reconfigure some tasks.

The release notes are available on GitHub.

What use cases have you found for WidgetRelay? I’d love to hear how you use it.

Many apps show information in their widgets that is not available anywhere else in such a simple way. I was missing a way to read those third-party widgets from Tasker, and after seeing that the app SmartSpacer can do this brilliantly, I made a small Tasker plugin to bring that idea to Tasker.

WidgetRelay hosts those widgets invisibly (this requires the “Display over other apps” permission) and passes their contents to Tasker, either as a single value or as a JSON tree of the entire widget.

It also works the other way around: you can click elements inside a widget, which means a widget button can become something a Tasker task can trigger.

There are four Tasker plugin actions in total: Get Widget Data, Get Widget JSON, Click Widget Path and Click Widget Text. In the config screen you pick the app, widget and size, tap the nodes you want under the live preview, and that's it.

If you want to know more about the technical side, read https://github.com/CennoxX/WidgetRelay

Here is the APK: https://github.com/CennoxX/WidgetRelay/releases/tag/v1.0