latest
Pushbullet is a necessary app for millions of users, but it's not the only service of its kind. Join launched back in 2015 as an alternative from prolific Android developer João Dias, best known for his work on Tasker, designed to control your phone remotely from your computer. It's been a while since the app received a significant new update, but that ends today. Join 3.0 is available now, and it comes with a ton of adjustments for how the service works on all of your devices.
AutoVoice 4.0 combines Tasker and Alexa to automate your entire home
And you don't even need an Echo device to use it
Tasker's a capable tool for power users, but it's not the only app developed by João Dias. AutoVoice is one of the easiest ways to sync your smart home gear with Tasker and Google Assistant, adding custom actions, routines, and more. The app has lost its Assistant support time and time again, but with AutoVoice 4.0, it can now use integration with Alexa to automate all of your home routines.
AutoVoice Assistant Action is back for all supported languages
Google's infamously terrible developer support strikes twice in a year
Read update
Google has taken down the Assistant-integrated AutoVoice Action again, for the second time in a year. This time, the company claims the action "promotes content that advocates hate or violence or promotes discrimination," apparently because someone in Germany stringed together a clearly custom command that made the Assistant spout off some hate speech.
Join app will soon have a new desktop client with clipboard sync and keyboard shortcuts
It's in beta, for now
Join is the Pushbullet clone created by João Dias (also known as 'joaomgcd'), the same developer behind Tasker and many of its popular add-ons. It allows notifications from your Android device to appear on your computer, complete with the ability to respond to text messages, take screenshots, and more. Join is now testing a new desktop application, with multi-platform support and the ability to sync clipboard data.
Powerful Android automation app Tasker changed hands to joaomgcd in the summer, and it continues to go from strength to strength. The latest release takes it up to version 5.5, and there are a host of additions including better import/export functionality, Google Drive integration, and custom setting monitoring.
A few months ago, we heard that Tasker was changing hands. João Dias, known for his impressive work on AutoApps and Join, took over the app and has since spent the last few months learning the ins and outs of his new property. Today marks his first public release, v5.2, and it brings quite a few additions and quality-of-life improvements for Tasker users.
Joaomgcd (Joao Dias) is responsible for some of Android's most interesting apps, and one of those is Join. It gives you convenient remote access to the notifications, files, and clipboard on your Android device while you're using another system (and vice versa), and there are a lot of even deeper integrations besides. A major new update to version 2.0 has just been announced, making Join more useful than ever.
For years, Tasker has been one of the best power-user apps available for Android, with the ability to automate (or create shortcuts for) a vast number of actions. Dozens of third-party plugins are also available for Tasker, further expanding its functionality. But after eight years of development, Crafty Apps EU has now transferred ownership of the application to joaomgcd, a major Android developer known for Join and AutoApps.
Late last year we saw the introduction of a useful little app called AutoTools, dubbed 'Tasker Plus" by its developer, Joaomgcd. The AutoTools plugin adds to Tasker's already large feature set, with the ability to change certain system settings and control different toggles. João has been busy working on an upgrade, and now version 2.0 is upon us, which includes web screens, a navigation drawer, and HTML reading capabilities.
Fellow long time Tasker users will be familiar with João Dias and his awesome AutoApps plugins. One of his most popular, and the one that I use the most, is AutoVoice. Basically, the plugin listens to and hijacks Google Now commands to trigger Tasker profiles — I had a simple one that would turn on my PC via Wake On LAN when I said "Okay, Google. Turn on my computer." Now v3.0 has been officially released and brings some awesome Home, Echo, and IFTTT integrations as well as natural language commands.
João Dias, better known online by his handle Joaomgcd, is one of the most prolific indie developers around. In addition to his work on a smorgasbord of Tasker plugins, he's also released Join, a Pushbullet alternative that allows sending commands to your phone via a Chrome extension on a nearby PC. The latest update to the extension adds voice control, so users can "push" links to Android or perform other tasks with a Star Trek-style voice command. It even uses "Computer" as the prompt - classy.
You can do a lot of stuff with Tasker - the possibilities are almost endless. Because they were almost endless, developer joaomgcd has gone and filled in the gaps, creating AutoTools, a new Tasker plugin. Joao calls this 'Tasker Plus,' namely because it can do everything Tasker cannot do.
Join is a pretty cool app. It can do a variety of things, from sending texts to transferring files across your variety of different devices. Developer joaomgcd has added another feature to its extensive arsenal, making it easy to record an Android phone or tablet's screen from another device.
We're big fans of cross-device sync here at Android Police. Therefore, we're of the opinion that if you haven't yet heard of joaomgcd's latest app, you're missing out. Join is a bit like Pushbullet, in that it can do Android-to-desktop notifications, desktop SMS, and a cross-device clipboard. But it can do a lot more; for example, you can set your Android wallpaper through Chrome simply by right-clicking on an image of your choice and selecting "Set image as wallpaper."
Join, by joaomgcd of many Tasker plugins and automation apps fame, has been in beta for nearly two months now. When I tried it out at launch, it already had a lot of its functionality covered, allowing your phones and computers to share things with each other: links, SMS messages, screenshots, media files, copied text, and more. The app has been getting frequent updates since then, adding Tasker integration and making it possible to send SMS from any browser without the need for a Chrome extension. You could say that Pushbullet's little brother has grown up to actually compete against it.
João Dias, also known as joaomgcd on the Play Store, is one of those developers who are never, ever, content with the current capabilities of modern smartphones. He wants them to be more powerful, respond to more commands, allow more interactions, all from more interfaces. His AutoVoice app has been available for a while, allowing you to harness the OK Google interaction scheme to automate plenty of new actions and issue commands that Google's default algorithms don't yet understand.