How to Control the Camera and Music Player With Amazfit Bip.
When I bought the Amazfit Bip I was thrilled to see that all I can do with it. With the support of Xiaomi, I knew it would have huge support for third-party apps and custom firmwares. Well, it turns out you can control your music, camera, TV and many other things with the Amazfit Bip. In this article, let’s just focus on controlling the camera or music player with Amazfit Bip. Unfortunately, this workaround only works with Android, so if you are looking for Amazfit Bip Camera Control from iPhone, or even music control, this article is not for you.
Amazfit Bip Camera Control
To control the camera, we need to remap the button on the Amazfit Bip. After much research, I found the perfect app for this – Mi Band 2/3 and Amazfit Selfie. This allows you to reassign the action of the button when you click on the picture. However, the caveat is that it only works with a select number of third-party camera apps. Below are the camera apps it works with.
- Round Camera
- Night Selfie Camera
- Bacon Camera
- Free Camera
Connecting the app to Amazfit Bip is quite simple. You must have Mi-Fit installed and the bracelet connected to the Mi-Fit app. Now install the Mi Band 2/3 & Amazfit Selfie app and open it. The app will automatically detect the MAC address of the Amazfit Bip if it is connected to the Mi-Fit. If the app cannot identify the watch, you can manually enter the MAC address in the text box. To find out the MAC address of the Bip, open the Mi-Fit app, go to the profile section and click on Amazfit Bip in the “My devices†section.
Once you get to the Amazfit Bip page, scroll down the page. Here you will find the “Bluetooth address”, which in turn is the MAC address of the Amazfit Bip.
Read: How to Unlock Windows PC with Mi Band 3/2
Now, after you have entered the MAC address, click the Connect button at the bottom.
After you hit the connect button, wait a few seconds and the app will connect to the watch. Once this happens, the “Connect” button at the bottom will change to “Disconnect”.
After the app has successfully connected to the watch, open the camera app. In my case, I installed the Bacon Camera app. Now I just need to open the camera app and with one button press on the Amazfit Bip. This will trigger the camera shutter and click the image. The strap vibrates slightly to indicate that it has clicked an image.
This is a handy utility when you want to take a group shot or if you have a camera mounted on a tripod. It would be better if it worked with all camera apps though. This was not a big problem for me since I already used the Bacon Camera.
Another disadvantage is that on the Amazfit Bip, a single click works as a back button. Hence, when Mi Band 2/3 and Amazfit Selfie are connected to the watch, the function of the back button stops working. The only way to deal with this is to connect the Mi Band 2/3 app and Amazfit Selfie only when you need to take a photo.
Amazfit Bip Music Control
Unfortunately, there isn’t a single app that lets you control your music player and camera. For the music player, we need another third party app called “Amazfit BIP Assistant”. This is one of those apps with a poor user interface but extremely useful features.
Anyway, once you’ve installed the app, open it up and it will ask you to enter the MAC address manually. If you are unsure how to do this, follow the steps above
Once you connect the strap to the app, you will be presented with a screen to customize the actions of the watch buttons. If it is confusing, we are on the same plane. I kept the action “2 Pause 3 Next,†which means that pressing twice pauses / plays the song, and pressing three times skips to the next song.
You also get a slider that lets you adjust the spacing between clicks. The default of 600ms is fine and will work for most of you.
You also have the option to map a long button press to enable Google Assistant on the volume control. However, make sure no other actions are assigned to you for the long press. In my case, a long press was assigned to start an outdoor activity. In such scenarios, conflicts may arise and the actions will not work as expected.
Closing words
You can find many applications in the Play Store to control your music player. I liked these applications for their simplicity and ease of use. If you need additional features such as charts of your data, comparisons, reports, as well as button remapping, you can choose paid apps such as “Amazfit & Tools†or “Notification and fitness for Amazfitâ€.
For any questions or concerns, let me know in the comments below. You can also come and chat with me on Instagram and talk about Tech.
Also Read: How to Add Custom Watch Faces on Amazfit Bip
How to Control the Camera and Music Player With Amazfit Bip