How to Use Tasker: The Ultimate Guide

Android as a biological system and stage has proven to exhibit enormous possibilities, and  this is one motivation behind why there are several applications which have a go at tackling a similar issue, in their own special way. This openness and versatility fosters immense opportunities for app developers. But that isn’t the case all the time, the vast catalog of apps hinder app discover-ability and thus sometimes we may end up in a situation, we don’t discover an answer in type of an application. This is where automation apps like Tasker come into play.

It would not be right to crown Tasker as the Zeus of all automation apps on the Play Store. Placing it in basic words, Tasker resembles the IFTT App on steroids with a huge amount of additional components.

Why a dedicated tutorial on such a popular app?

The response to this question is “Complexity”; while Tasker certainly is the best app to explore how smart your smartphone can actually get, it’s never considered the most user-friendly or intuitive one. Tasker has been infamous for its complexity and yes, it does take a while to get used to its overwhelming UI. And most adopters leave midway because of how intimidating it can get to configure it to work correctly. Even one slight misconfiguration can end up showing unexpected results. Also, the Tasker website itself is not very helpful in providing a basic training on how to use it.  In this article, we’ll cover all the fundamental components of Tasker and clarify you in satisfactory detail what every part does. We would likewise take a gander at a portion of the reasons why some of the time Tasker may not work.

Tasker: The Breakdown

The Tasker app can be broken down to 6 main components

• Tasks – It can be called a list of Actions that the device performs at a certain point of time.

• Profiles – It’s a list of tasks that the system performs based on the Contexts.

• Contexts –Contexts provide the data (time, location, connectivity) to trigger the particular Profile.

• Plugins – Pre-built solutions by other developers to enhance the functionality of Tasker that can be chained together with your own profiles as well.

• Recipes – Recipes are the profiles or automation tweaks that users of Tasker can share with each other which others can import right into the app.

• Scenes– Custom UI elements that you can create to interact with.

Tasker can be considered as a glue which binds the capabilities of all your apps and your device’s hardware to create amazing experiences. There are infinite possibilities to the extent to which you can experiment with Tasker to create amazing solutions. But for the sake of explanation we will focus on a basic one and use it to dive deeper into the app

Creating Your First Tasker Profile:

In this segment, we will take into account all the terms that we came across to create our very own profile that starts Daydream mode when you put your phone to charge.

For the public who don’t know, Daydream mode lets you set up screensaver that display snaps, colorful backgrounds, and more when your device is charging or docked.

If you don’t have Tasker app on your Android device yet, install it from here. It offers 7 days’ trial, which you can try before opting for paid version of the app.

• Tap the + button in the Profiles

• Tap on State

Here, we will define our Context which will activate the profile.

• Tap on Hardware and then tap on USB Connected

• Go back to the App’s Home screen by tapping the back button

We will now define our Task.

• You will be encouraged to create a New Task, create one and name it, here we will name it Daydream
• Tap the + button to add Actions

• To launch an app, we need to tap on App and then hit Launch App

• Select the Daydream app and leave other options unchanged

• Go back to see your Profile is active. Now every-time you connect your USB, the phone will go to Daydream mode.

And just like that a basic profile is ready that will put your phone to Daydream mode when you dock it/ put it to charge. Presently you can do a similar thing from the show settings of your telephone, without the need of Tasker. But the fact that we could harness the power of the system by linking one app to a context is amazing. Obviously, it’s not generally this simple to make a profile/formula the additionally astounding your thought gets the more unpredictable it progresses toward becoming to get it arranged on Tasker. Here are some of the best and most useful Tasker profiles list, you should refer.

What’s going on in the background?

Let’s see what this Tasker profile does and what really occurs out of sight.

• Whenever you connect your USB to the phone, a system Context is triggered which basically means that the hardware is telling the Android OS, “Hello, the USB is associated play out your required activities”.
• The same setting is picked by Tasker, so now Tasker realizes that the phone is in the connected state and so it starts looking for the Profile which matches this context, once found, Tasker looks for the Tasks it was asked to perform in that state, which leads it to the Daydream task.
• It goes through the list of Actions listed under the task and hits the App Launch activity, so it realizes that now it needs to begin the App client had requested that it dispatch when USB was associated.
• Now it drills into the activity and searches for the application that should be launched.
• According to our configuration, Tasker launches Daydream (a system app).

So, it is clear that Tasker is picking up the system contexts and checking it with it’s own particular rundown of settings, at whatever point a setting matches, it performs the task specified along with the context; which, in this case was launching an app.

Times when Tasker fails to work:

Of course, every coin has two sides and so does Tasker. There are many times when Tasker just fails to work even though everything you did was right. Let’s see a couple of possible cases where it fails

• When there is a conflict between a system task and Tasker; here’s a better explanation, Android permission model does not allow apps or secondary services to have more priority than the system level tasks, hence whenever the android system needs to choose as to what it should prioritize, your incoming message notification or a Tasker trigger, it obviously prioritizes the former.

• On Samsung devices, due to the memory intensiveness of the Touch Whiz Launcher, quite often Tasker gets killed in the background due to low memory.

• Across different versions of Android; each iteration of Android introduces new features and patches some security flaws as a result, sometimes, one profile might work differently across 2 different Android releases.

• Improper Plugin configuration; sometimes even if our profiles is correct, the task might fail due to a poorly configured plugin.

• Root; some actions require root privileges and fail to work without them.

Conclusion

While Tasker packs in a lot of power, it still remains hard to get past its steep learning curve. At times, a misconfiguration can lead to peculiar behavior of the device. And even though everything seems to be right at times, Tasker just doesn’t work. It’s mostly a hit and trial technique to get around with it and patience is the key to automation in this context.