How to schedule automated jobs on a group of company Android phones

In short: With BenchFleet, record or build a workflow once, then schedule it on a group of company phones at a set time, every few minutes or hours, or once, and choose what happens to a run the computer missed. Schedules come with Pro, at £12 a month + VAT. MDMs and in-app scheduling are compared below.

Daily health checks, a report taken from an app every morning, a test run every hour: routine jobs on company phones are easy to forget and slow to do by hand. There are three kinds of tool for scheduling them, and they work at different levels of the phone. Checked on 23 October 2026 on each tool's own pages. We make BenchFleet.

Free for up to 3 phones, with no account. Pro adds workflows, schedules and AI for up to 25 phones from £12 a month + VAT.

Download free See pricing

The options compared

Option	What it schedules	Where it runs	Fits	Website
BenchFleet	Workflows that use any app on the phone: open apps, tap, type, read text, check the screen	A desktop app on your computer, with the phones on USB or Wi-Fi; other computers through gateways (Team)	Company phones on a bench, in a lab or at a desk	benchfleet.com
An MDM or EMM	Policies, app installs, settings and the product's own tasks on enrolled phones	The vendor's cloud or your server, and an agent on each phone	Phones staff carry, anywhere	Your MDM's site
AirDroid Business	Remote control, policies, alerts; scheduled tasks are listed in its plan comparison	Its cloud and its Biz Daemon app on each phone	Fleets of dedicated or company devices	airdroid.com
Android device owner apps	What the device policy controller app allows: lock task mode, updates, user management	An admin app on each fully managed phone	Single-purpose devices such as kiosks	developer.android.com
WorkManager	Your own app's background work	Inside your app, on each phone	Developers scheduling their own app's work	developer.android.com
Automate or MacroDroid	Automations built on the phone itself	One app on one phone	A single phone, set up by hand	llamalab.com, macrodroid.com

AirDroid Business costs from $1.00 a device a month billed annually, with 10 devices minimum, on 23 October 2026.

How BenchFleet schedules work Pro

Make the workflow. Record the task by doing it once on a phone, build it in the visual editor, or write YAML. Steps find elements by their text and role, so the same workflow runs on phones with different screens. See automating Android phones without code.
Choose the phones. One phone, a group, or every phone that matches a filter; groups can follow a rule, so new phones join on their own.
Add a schedule. At a set time, every few minutes or hours, or once, in the time zone you choose. For a run the computer missed, choose to skip it or run it once.
Let it run. Each run keeps a timeline with screenshots. Failures and stuck phones gather on the Attention page, and alert rules can notify you on the desktop, by email or by webhook.

What keeps it safe on company phones:

People first. Automation never touches a phone someone is controlling; a job pauses while a person has taken over and checks the screen before it carries on.
Human-only steps stop. At a CAPTCHA, a sign-in check or a login screen, the job stops and hands the phone to a person, and that app is put on hold on that phone until someone deals with it.
Approvals. Requests that reach more than ten phones wait for a person, and approval rules can hold other sensitive steps.
A record. Every action is in a hash-chained audit log.

In the project's own 24-hour test, a read-only workflow scheduled every 10 minutes on 17 real phones ran 2,465 jobs, all successful, with no firing missed: see the reliability report.

BenchFleet needs USB debugging on each phone, so it suits company phones you keep together: test phones, shared phones and device benches, not phones in staff's pockets. More on running a fleet in controlling many Android phones from one PC.

AirDroid, Automate, MacroDroid and WorkManager are the names of their owners' products and projects. BenchFleet is not affiliated with any of them.

Questions

How do I run the same task on many Android phones every day?

Record the task once as a workflow in BenchFleet, put the phones in a group, and add a schedule for that group at the time you want. Each run keeps a timeline with screenshots, and a phone that fails raises an item on the Attention page.

What happens if the computer was off when a run was due?

For each schedule you choose whether a missed run is skipped or run once when the computer is back. The phones and the computer running BenchFleet need to be on for runs to happen.

Can an MDM schedule tasks on phones?

MDMs push policies, apps and settings to enrolled phones, and some list scheduled tasks; AirDroid Business, for example, lists scheduled tasks in its plan comparison. What they can run on the phone depends on the product.

What is WorkManager?

An Android library you use inside your own app to schedule that app's background work. It runs on each phone where your app is installed and cannot drive other apps or other phones.

Will a scheduled job interrupt someone using the phone?

Not in BenchFleet. Automation never touches a phone a person is controlling, and a job waits or pauses while someone has taken it over.

Start with the Free plan