WidgetRelay

Read and click Android home screen widgets from Tasker.

Lots of apps show information in a widget that they expose nowhere else — no API, no notification, no content provider. WidgetRelay hosts those widgets invisibly in the background, extracts their contents, and hands them to Tasker as plain text or JSON. It can also click elements inside them, so a widget button becomes something a task can trigger.

Typical uses:

• Read a value that only exists in a widget (unread counts, a sensor reading, the next departure, a balance, "now playing")
• Poll a widget on a schedule and act when the value changes
• Press a widget's button from a task (refresh, play/pause, toggle)

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Table of contents

• Actions
• Requirements
• Setup
• Building
• How it works
• Implementation notes (the hacks)
• Limitations
• License

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Actions

WidgetRelay registers four Tasker plugin actions. All of them are configured the same way: pick an app and widget, choose a size, and — for all but the JSON action — tap the element you want in the extracted-data list.

Addressing elements

Elements are addressed by their path in the widget's view tree: /root is the widget itself, /root/0/2 is the third child of the first child, and so on. The configuration screen shows every extracted element with its path, so you normally never type one by hand — you tap the element and the path is filled in.

Paths are stable as long as the widget's layout doesn't change. If a widget rearranges itself (many do, depending on state or size), prefer Click Widget Text, which searches by the visible text or content description instead. Both input fields accept Tasker variables, so %par1 or %text work too.

JSON output

Get Widget JSON returns the widget as a nested tree. type is the view class, children is only present when a node ha