Tasker: What It Is & How to Use It

This article describes the Tasker app for Android, where to buy it or download a free trial, and how to use it to trigger an action when conditions you set are met.

What Is Tasker and How Does It Work?

Tasker is a paid Android app that triggers certain actions to be run if certain conditions are met. Open your favorite music app when you plug your headphones in, text someone a predefined message when you arrive at work each morning, lock apps with a password, enable Wi-Fi when you're at home, and dim the screen brightness between 11 PM and 6 AM when connected to your home Wi-Fi. The possibilities are nearly endless.

The app works like a recipe. When making a meal, all the necessary ingredients are required for the final product to be considered complete. With Tasker, all the necessary conditions that you choose must be active for the task to run.

You can even share your tasks with others through an XML file that they can start using immediately after they're imported into their app.

A Simple Tasker Example

When a simple condition is selected where the phone battery is fully charged, that condition can be associated with an action where the phone will show the text "Fully charged." The alert task runs in this scenario only when the phone is fully charged.

This simple task can be made more complex by adding additional conditions such as between 5 AM and 10 PM, on the weekends only, and when you're at home. Now, all four conditions have to be met before the phone will speak whatever it is you typed.

How to Get the Tasker Android App

You can purchase and download Tasker from the Google Play store:

To get a free 7-day trial of Tasker, use the download link from the Tasker for Android website:

What You Can Do With Tasker

The above examples are a few of the things that you can have the Tasker app do. There are many conditions to choose from and over 200 built-in actions that those conditions can trigger.

The conditions you can make are sectioned into categories called Application, Day, Event, Location, State, and Time. This means you can add conditions that relate to a broad number of things such as when the display is on or off, you get a missed call or an SMS failed to send, a particular file was opened or modified, you arrive at a certain location, you connect it over USB, and many others.

Once one to four conditions are tied to a task, those grouped conditions are stored as profiles. Profiles are connected to tasks that you want to run in response to any conditions you chose.

Multiple actions can be grouped together to form one task, all of which run one after the other when the task is triggered. You can import actions that have to do with alerts, beeps, audio, display, location, media, settings, make an app open or close, send a text, and a lot more.

Once a profile has been made, disable or enable it at any time without affecting other profiles you have. Disable Tasker to stop your profiles from running; it can be toggled back on with one tap.