Llama, Llama, Llama

One of my go to Android apps is Llama. It is a free app that controls phone actions based on your location. There are other apps such as Tasker that can do the same thing. I haven't tried it though as Llama does everything I need it to do and it does it well.

After you download Llama it has four tabs on the home screen, areas, events, profiles and recent. You set up areas and they dictate what your phone does when it leaves or enters an designated area. So for me I have the areas, Church, Home and Work. You can define these areas by either WiFi, GPS or cell towers. I don't like to use GPS because I don't wan to leave my phone's GPS antenna on and I don't use cell towers because that covers to big an area for my taste.

That leaves WiFi. The WiFi settings are experimental you have to go through a couple of menu items to activate it. Go to the Events tab. Tap the 3 dots at the bottom right of the screen. Tap settings and scroll to Experimental Stuff here be dragons. Tap on that and then check the box next to Check for WiFi networks. Use the back arrow to exit the menu.

Profiles modify your phone volumes and can change your ringtones. You can also change the look of the Llama icon for each profile. When Llama is running the icon is visible in your notification area at the top. For me my silent profile is a red Llama. So I can glance at my phone and see the volume notifications quickly. If you want to switch to a profile, say when you go into a meeting, just tap it and you can even lock it to that profile for the amount of time you choose.

Finally events are things you want the phone to do at certain times and with certain triggers. For instance I have it set up so that when I get home it switches to the normal profile, disable the lock after unlocking and turn on haptic feed back. That way all the volumes are up and I don't have to unlock the phone every time I use it. I do have it setup to re-enable the lock screen when I leave home. I also have it setup so when I'm home and it's between 11pm and 6am it is completely silent. That way I will not hear any random notifications that could wake me. But at 6am it goes back to normal so I can hear my alarm.

You can have multiple conditions for each event based on different criteria such as entering a defined area, leaving an area, time of day or day of the week. Then you can have it do a wide variety of actions. I have not counted them all but a guess would put it around fifty in the list. You can change the profile, lock the screen, reboot the phone, shut off the WiFi and the list goes on. At one point I had it setup so that when I got home my phone would play the Imperial March from Star Wars.

It takes awhile to set it up but it is worth it. This has become one of my favorite apps and one I use every day, without even thinking about it because the app does it all for me. There are a million plus apps in the Google Play store. It is difficult to put together a top ten list or some sort of best of app list. There are so many apps that do similar things and not every one uses them the same or uses their phones the same. If you are looking for a good app to manage your phone in different situations then this is it.