How to automatically download the monthly Watchtower and Awake magazines to your iPhone or iPad

January 7, 2016

Update: This workflow was not properly working before 01/12/2016. If you downloaded before then, please redownload now.

With all the wonderful information being provided by Jehovah’s organization these days, we have new things to download all the time. Sometimes I feel like I’m going to forget something. Therefore, I wanted to make things easier through the wonderful world of automation. Of course, I’ll use my favorite automation app, Workflow, to accomplish everything. If you haven’t heard about Workflow, please check out my video review here.

In this post my end goal is to automatically download the Watchtower or Awake magazine every month without having to remember it. So I built a workflow to do exactly that (I have a similar workflow to download Our Christian Life and Ministry Meeting Workbooks here). It will go out to JW.org, find the current month’s magazine, download it, show you a preview, and then allow you to open it in iBooks or another app you’d like to use (I prefer Documents). You don’t have to build this workflow yourself, you can just grab the one I’ve already made at the following link. Again, you’ll need the Workflow app too.

Variations:
English PDF – English ePub
German PDF – German ePub
Spanish PDF
French PDF
Chinese Simplified PDF
Chinese Traditional PDF

I also wanted to set a repeating alarm to run this workflow every month. This is accomplished with the Launch Center Pro app. Launch Center Pro works in conjunction with the Workflow app to schedule when you want a workflow to run. I’ve got mine set to the first of every month. This will pop up a notification on my iPhone from Launch Center Pro. When I tap on it, the Workflow app will automatically open and trigger the Magazine download process. This video will show you how it all works.

Follow the steps below to schedule your workflow in Launch Center Pro.

Remember, while set up might be slightly complex (its not really), the beauty lies in setting and forgetting it! Once you have it running on your iPhone or iPad, you won’t have to think about it again.

Here are the apps you’ll need below. There are a ton of ways to customize these workflows too. For example, instead of opening the files in iBooks or another app, I have them automatically uploaded to my Dropbox account. If you have any questions on how to customize these workflows, leave them in the comments below. You might also like to check out the other theocratic workflows I’ve set up here.