For about 6 years now my main personal phone has been an Android (currently Samsung Galaxy S20). However just a few weeks ago I decided on a change and swapped across to an iPhone 13 Pro. Overall I would say the change has been a success, (i.e. it's very quick, has amazing battery life, better camera etc.) and I've found that Apple Car play loads pretty much instantly in the car (wired), vs Android Auto which whilst not the end of the world, can take over 30 seconds to load once connected. It's something I've just lived with but overall Apple car play just seems much quicker and snappier.
However there is one thing that the Samsung beat the iPhone at hands down, and that was the ability to run an App called Macrodroid. It's a small app that allows you to create macros, and in my case it's set that when the phone connects to my current car's (the GTI) Bluetooth, it disables WIFI on the phone and activates the personal hotspot feature that enable the car's on line services to connect to the internet i.e. live traffic data, petrol prices, online POI and destinations etc.). When the phone disconnects from the car's Bluetooth, then Macrodroid shuts off the personal hotspot and reactivates the phones WIFI. Its all automatic and does it's thing perfectly every time without me having to think about it, and has been doing so perfectly for over 2 years. Yes, I know a lot of you don't like the VW online services but I happen to like it a lot.
Now the iPhone doesn't have an IOS equivalent to Macrodroid, and I've tried working with IOS's shortcut's and can't seem to manage the same thing (unless anyone knows how). No problem I thought, I'll just manually activate the personal hotspot feature on the iPhone before I put the phone in the centre console for each journey. There seems to be 2 issues with that though. Firstly I don't always remember to active the hotspot feature on the phone before I set off, meaning I can't do anything about it until I've parked up or have a passenger in the car to mess with the phone, and secondly the car or the phone don't seem to like each other much as very frequently, even if I do activate the hotspot and the car connects, I've found that weirdly part way though the journey the phone and car just disconnect (even though the hotspot feature is still on) - I can't seem to work out why. Any thoughts anyone ?
I sorta don't really want to swap phones again just to cure the hotspot connectivity issues if I don't' have to, so do any tech genius's have any ideas how I overcome this please ?
I'd appreciate any comments ?