Android 11 power menu support

Yes, as long as you have Google Assistant set up.

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The Android app doesn’t support this yet, but there’s a feature request on GitHub: Support external device controls on Android 11 · Issue #2210 · openhab/openhab-android · GitHub

However you can achieve something similar with quick tiles, that are available for Android 7+.

If you have openHAB integrated with Google Assistant then you can put any Items exposed to Google Assistant there. I have used that since the feature was released.

I use the quicktiles. They’re great.

Samsung has created a separate “Devices” button in the notification shade and disabled access from the power button, so that feature isn’t useful to me (since the quick tiles are easier to access). But I’ve actually gone in another direction and used the sideActions app to assign Tasker shortcuts to my power and volume buttons.

I could see the Devices menu being useful for other people, but I find it annoying that the you can only see toggles for one system at a time (e.g. Google Home OR Smartthings). It’s silly that they wouldn’t just let you combine systems in one page.

On a related note, Tasker has support for the Devices menu.

One issue I saw when I first looked at this feature: The OS may call a function that should publish all “Items”. This is feasible for commercial smart home app with ~10 bulbs, but for an openHAB server this hundreds of items?
I have to see how the items can be filtered before publishing to the OS.

Yeah, that could be overwhelming. You can choose which toggles to add to your Devices menu, but it would be very difficult adding/editing if you have hundreds of items.

Would it be possible to add a metadata option for “Android Devices Menu”, and then have the app only publish those ones to the OS?

I’m honestly not convinced that this will last past one or two versions of Android (like so many other much-hyped features). That’s due in large part to Samsung neutering the feature, which prevents it from being useful for many, many Android users. Mind you, even if I could access it from the power menu, I don’t know how often I’d bother.

Something like this has to be done. I’ll think about this if I implement this feature. According to Mobile & Tablet Android Version Market Share Worldwide | Statcounter Global Stats the share of Android 11 is currently at about 9%.

I remember reading an article that stated that Google changed the terms from “must implement” to “can/should implement”, so there might be other vendors that don’t support this feature as well.

I’d vote for relying on Tasker to fill the gap in the short term, and waiting until the world has decided if this feature is valuable. The only downside of Tasker is that it doesn’t show the current state of an item.

@Niwla23, I can help you getting Tasker set up if you need assistance.

If one has to apply metadata anyway maybe it’s best to only allow this feature through Google Assistant integration and leave the Android app out of it entirely. I can confirm that it works great that way right now, and it shows the current state of the Items too (unlike Tasker which does not).

I like the power menu as my phone has a habit of unlocking in my pocket and it’s a lot harder to accidentally open the garage doors if you have to long press the power button than it is to swipe down and tap a quicktile or, heaven forbid, using a home screen widget.

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You can configure the openHAB quick tiles to require an unlocked screen before the Item update happens.

Right but i have so called “smart lock” enabled which doesn’t always work as I expect and lock the phone when I put it in my pocket. And when I’m doing yard work and such it registers all sorts of touch events. I’ve had it share random videos and post jibberish to Facebook, make phone calls, send jibberish text messages, and even mess with the tiles in the notifications. Once it started to heat up in my pocket only to discover the flash light turned on.

I use Tasker for doing this. It has OH integration. You even can costumize the tiles. Just discovered it yesterday, so I need some time to learn how to costumize it properly.

YouTube video from João - Tasker dev

Screenshot Powermenu

Is there any free alternative to tasker? I can’t buy apps from play store

If you’re still looking for power-menu support, the free option is to use Google Home. Automate might have implemented this feature, but I wouldn’t know.

No sorry. To bad you can’t buy from the play store. Maybe you can contact João Dias for an alternative buying option? You can find him on Twitter or Reddit.

Good luck! :facepunch:t2:
Tasker costs you the price of a :beer: :joy::joy::joy:

Looking at the latest screenshots of the Android 12 Beta it seems that quick tiles now look like the tiles from the lock screen.

I even found a German article stating that smart home devices will be controlled from there: “So wachsen die Quicksetting-Schaltflächen nun zu milchig, farbigen Kacheln an und erinnern an iOS. Hier sollen sich auch Schaltflächen für Google Pay und zur Steuerung von Smart-Home-Komponenten finden.”
In English: “The quicksetting buttons grow to milky, colored tiles and are reminiscent of iOS. Buttons for Google Pay and for controlling smart home components should also be found here .”

I’m definitely going to wait for Android 12 and see if the power menu gets deprecated or not.

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No matter where they move the UI, they’ll be using this API. This is the API designed for smart home controls — with range sliders, current state and so on.

Anyway, would be nice if the Tasker integration in the Android client was expanded to allow querying item state values, this would probably be useful for more than adding state to those tiles…

To implement this the app would need to inform Tasker whenever a state of any Item changes, which isn’t feasible.

Nah, I meant querying, as in on-demand. A Tasker action that would, when invoked, get the value of the chosen item from the server and put the result into a Tasker variable. Polling could be implemented with this then in Tasker.

It has been implemented in the latest beta version: Release 2.19.5-beta · openhab/openhab-android · GitHub

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