How to supercharge your Android device’s abilities with Tasker

All of those apps were nifty little utilities that targeted a particular area of smartphone usage and added some heuristics to it to make your phone smarter still. But when it comes to automation on Android, very few apps can claim to be in the same league as the grandaddy of them all — Tasker. Grab the free 7-day trial from the developer’s website before you proceed.

Tasker can detect when you’re at home, for instance, and enable or disable certain settings on your phone to make it function better in that environment. It can launch apps automatically and perform actions based on apps being launched by you. The uses of Tasker are plenty, and we’ll take a look at some examples in this article.
Tasker is essentially a programming tool that allows you to create mini applications on your phone for your own usage. It has a steep learning curve and is only for the more advanced smartphone users among us. But for those who enjoy a challenge, Tasker is (really, really) fun to play with and a genuinely useful tool to have in your arsenal.

An introduction to the interface

By default, Tasker has three tabs along the top—Profiles, Tasks and Scenes—and a Home tab at the bottom. A profile in Tasker is a group of contexts organised with the ‘AND’ logic. You can, for instance, create a profile that is only active on Sundays, when your phone is plugged in and the screen is turned on. This profile will only work when all three contexts are true.
A task is what a profile will do once it triggers. So, for example, you can set your journal app to be launched when the profile above is true. If you set it up that way, Tasker will launch your journal app every Sunday when you plug the phone into a power outlet, thus making it much more likely that you’ll stick to that journaling routine you’ve been trying to get into.
As part of a task, you can set Tasker to throw up a custom-made window with buttons and text fields of your choosing—to take some input from the user, for example, or to give them some options—and that is called a scene. For the purposes of this article, however, we won’t be looking into the scenes aspect of Tasker.
There is a fourth tab on the top that is only visible if you turn off beginner mode in the app’s preferences, and it’s called “Vars”, which is short for “variables”. A variable can be any word preceded by a percentage [%] sign and can hold any value you assign to it. For example, you may want to assign the values “off” or “on” to a variable %BATT_SAVE_MODE, which will indicate whether the phone is in a low power state or not.
The Home tab at the bottom denotes the default project in Tasker. Any profiles, tasks and variables you create will go in the default project. In this article, we’ll stick to just that one project, but as you start to get comfortable with the app, you can always go back and reorganize things in whichever way you want.

When you create your first profile in Tasker, you will notice that it can have application, day, event, location, state and time contexts. Let’s go through each one in order:

• Application: You can set a profile to be active when an app is running or not running. You can select multiple apps for a single profile, so it’ll fire when either of those apps is active.
• Day: Selecting a day of the week or month will make that profile active on that particular day every week/month.
• Event: An event in Tasker terminology is any action that your phone can perform. The screen turning on, the alarm clock firing and the wallpaper being changed are all events. An event context triggers the task only once, as soon as the event occurs.
• Location: Tasker allows you to use your phone’s location features to create profiles that will only be active in certain locations, or ones that won’t be active in specific spots.
• State: The state context is the most used one in the app. It refers to various modes the phone may be in that may activate a profile. The phone being connected to a WiFi network, paired with a Bluetooth device or connected to an external power source are all examples of states. A state differs from an event in that a state profile is active throughout the time that the device is in that state.
• Time: The time context will let you define profiles that will only be activated at a certain time or between certain hours on any given day.

Next, let’s dig into creating a profile…