Before you go and download Android Bot Maker, there are a couple of requirements. First, your device needs to be rooted. The second is that you need to be running Android OS 4.1 or higher. If you meet this criteria, let’s get to how Android Bot Maker can make your days a little bit better. Keep in mind these will be repeating actions and run until you press the stop button.
Setting up a “Bot” to automate your Android phone
The process for creating a “Bot” takes some foresight. Most people are not going to know how to read the coordinates of where they are touching or swiping on the screen. What you will need to do is turn on the pointer settings on your device. To figure out the X or Y location for the swipe or tap location, follow this path in your Android menu settings: “Settings -> Developer options -> Show pointer location”. You will need to grant Superuser permissions as well.
Once you have those on, you can see the information in the top bar of the overlay.
Now that you have that information, you can make your first Bot. Press the plus sign in the top left of the screen.
This will bring up your choices of actions.
For this example, I chose to make it swipe through my app drawer so I could test the functionality. I started with a tap on my app drawer button. I had to go to the home screen and get the coordinates for the app drawer button while in landscape mode – x=1200 y=400.
Next I set Sleep for 1 second. You need to have some sort of sleep function, even if it is only 1 second, for the Bot to work. I also needed to see how long the swipe needed to be to turn the page in the app drawer. Here are my settings – x1=1000 y1=400 x2=400 y2=400. This makes the swipe long enough and swipes the page in a place where there are no app icons. To run the Bot, press the blue floating Play button the the left of the screen. Stop the Bot by pressing the stop button. When the Bot is started, Android Bot Maker taps the screen where the App Drawer button is, then swipes the page from right to left.
Other things to automate
While this example might not be a WOW demonstration, with a little creativity, you can make Bots to cheat at very simple games or add text to a SMS and have it annoy friends. You can always make it more complicated. Click on your Gmail icon, open a new composition window and add text to a specific contact if you want. Just remember to set a long Sleep time at the end so you have time to stop the Bot.
Conclusion
Android Bot Maker is an app still in Beta so they are still ironing out a few bugs. Overall the app worked well but took some trial and error to get some of the Bots to work the way I intended them to. I couldn’t get Android Bot Maker to add text to an SMS or any other app’s text field, yet all of the other parts worked really well so it may have just been my device or error. Leave a comment if you have a rooted Nexus 7 and adding text works for you, or if you have another way to automate your Android phone. Image credit: Android BOT
