How I automate my Galaxy Watch AOD when I leave the house

Samsung's Modes and Routines app is a powerful, versatile tool that allows you to automate certain features and functions on your Galaxy devices. For example, you can instruct your phone to perform certain tasks when you leave the house.

Modes and Routines is unfortunately lacking when it comes to automating Galaxy Watch functions, but you can sometimes find interesting ways to work around those limitations.

A perfect example is how I automated my Galaxy Watch to enable the Always On Display whenever I leave the house and turn it back off when I get home. Here's how you can do it, too.

I always want to preserve battery life by keeping my Galaxy Watch's Always On Display off when I'm at home. However, I don't want my smartwatch to look completely blank when I'm out, so I always turn AOD on before I leave the house and turn it back off when I get back. Unless I forget.

With Routines, I eliminated that possibility. Routines doesn't natively offer many options for automating smartwatch AOD settings, and there isn't a native option for what I wanted to achieve. But here's one workaround I found.

Using Routines, you can instruct your Galaxy Watch to automatically turn on the Always On Display whenever you leave the house. Or, more accurately, when your phone is no longer connected to your home Wi-Fi network. To do this:

Now, whenever you leave the house and your phone loses its connection to your home Wi-Fi network, your Galaxy Watch will automatically enable its Always On Display. The routine stops and AOD turns off when you get home and your phone reconnects to your Wi-Fi network.

The downside to this method is probably obvious by now. The routine triggers based on your phone's connection status rather than your watch's.

In other words, if you want to go out for a jog and leave your smartphone at home, it will stay connected to your Wi-Fi network and won't trigger the Always On Display routine for your smartwatch. Otherwise, it's a convenient little routine that works every time.

NOTE: You can achieve a similar effect using home location data instead of your Wi-Fi network as an “If” condition. However, the area of coverage for your “home” location in Maps is around 100 meters, which is likely greater than the range of your Wi-Fi network. Therefore, the Wi-Fi method can be slightly more accurate.