Simplify your life on Android: How I use Tasker automation
Published on March 9th, 2025Automation has become a vital tool for enhancing productivity and efficiency. From smart home devices to smartphone apps, automation allows us to simplify complex tasks and streamline our daily routines. One of the simple, versatile and powerful automation tools available for Android users is Tasker. In this article, I’m going to introduce Tasker and share some of the tasks it performs for me.
What is Tasker?
Tasker is an automation app for Android that enables you to create custom automation scripts, known as “tasks,” to perform a wide range of actions on your devices. With Tasker, you can automate virtually anything on your Android smartphone or tablet, from sending text messages to controlling smart home devices. The app has a relatively user-friendly interface and offers a comprehensive set of features that cater to both novice and advanced users.
I’ve tried MacroDroid, a competitor to Tasker, but found myself returning to Tasker as the stronger option.
Getting started with Tasker
To begin using Tasker, download and install the app from the Google Play store. Once installed, you’ll be greeted with a slightly complex interface that you’ll quickly get used to. Here’s a quick overview of how to create your first automation task:
- Create a profile: In Tasker, a profile is a condition or trigger that initiates a task. Examples of profiles include specific times of day, locations, or incoming notifications.
- Define a task: A task is a series of actions that Tasker will execute when the profile’s conditions are met. For example, you can create a task to turn on Wi-Fi (the task) that will be triggered when you arrive home (the profile condition).
- Add actions: Tasker offers a wide range of actions, such as sending an SMS, launching apps or adjusting volume settings. You can combine multiple actions that are performed in sequential order to create complex automation tasks. Actions include logic (if-statements) to enable basic programming through a combination of actions.
- Test and save: After creating your profile and task, test it (then is a “play” button in the bottom left of a task) to ensure it works as expected. Once you’re satisfied, just save the task, enable the profile and let Tasker handle the rest.
Popular uses of Tasker:
- Automate your morning routine: Start your day off right by creating a task that turns off silent mode, adjusts the brightness, and launches your favourite news app as soon as you wake up.
- Location-based automation: Use Tasker’s location-based profiles to automatically enable Wi-Fi when you arrive home, switch to silent mode at work, and turn on Bluetooth in your car.
- Battery management: Extend your device’s battery life by creating tasks that reduce screen brightness, disable background sync activities, and close resource-intensive apps when the battery level drops below a certain threshold.
- Home automation: Integrate Tasker with smart home devices such as smart lights, thermostats, and security cameras to create a seamless and automated home environment.
- Custom alerts and notifications: Receive custom notifications based on specific triggers, such as missed calls, low battery, or changes in weather conditions.
Advanced features of Tasker
Once you’ve become familiar with Tasker, there are some advanced features you may want to consider using to take your automation to the next level:
- Variables: Use variables to store and manipulate data within your tasks, allowing for more customizable automation scripts.
- Plugins: Extend Tasker’s functionality by integrating with third-party plugins, such as AutoInput, AutoVoice, and AutoLocation.
- Scenes: Create custom user interfaces, known as “scenes,” to interact with your tasks and profiles in a more visually appealing manner.
- Widgets: Use widgets to interact with Tasker from your device’s home screen.
How I use Tasker
Tasker opens up seamingly endless possibilities for automating everyday tasks on your Android device. Here are a few of my uses of Tasker:
Lottery jackpot checking
This profile checks a website for the next Euromillions lottery projected jackpot and notifies me if it’s a larger jackpot so I can enter.
Profile
The profile simply uses time and day entries to regularly perform checks.
- Time: 7pm every 12 hours (to limit to two notifications each day)
- Day: Wednesday or Saturday (to limit to two days)
Task
The actions in the task read a website that lists the projected jackpot, uses regex to extract the numeric jackpot value, and then displays a notification if the value is greater than a specific value.
- HTTP Request: GET from https://www.euro-millions.com
- Simple Match/Regex: Gets jackpot value from $http_data based on Regex: £[\/<span>div0-9\n\s]*Million
- Notify: If %mt_match (jackpot value from above) is greater than target
Preventing battery overcharging
My smartphone doesn’t have Charging Optimization on it. Whilst there is no software mechanism to stop charging at 80% on a device that doesn’t have Charging Optimization on it, this profile notifies me when the charge is at 80% or above, so I can stop charging it to keep the charge within the recommended 20%-80% range.
Profile
The profile uses two state-based conditions to trigger when the device is being powered, and has a battery level between 80% and 100%.
- State: Power state: Any source
- State: Battery Level state: from 80 to 100
Task
The actions in the task display a notification, announce the battery level out-loud, then turn the profile off and on (with a short pause in-between) to enable it to re-notify and announce if the situation continues.
- Notify: Notifies using %BATT% to show the current level in the notification, also uses sound to draw attention
- Wait: Waits 3 seconds for the notification alert sound to complete
- Say: Uses a text to voice engine to announce the battery percentage to me
- Wait: Waits 47 seconds to give a 1-minute gap between checks when combined with other wait commands
- Profile Status: Sets this profile to state OFF
- Wait: Waits 10 seconds for profile to be disabled before continuing
- Profile Status: Sets this profile to state ON so it will re-trigger if the device is still being charged at 80%+
Turning off Bluetooth when at home
As I only use Bluetooth for in-car communications, or when out walking, disabling it whilst at home saves battery power.
Profile
The profile uses two state-based conditions to trigger when the device is connected to Wifi with Bluetooth turned on.
- State: Wifi Connected = Any active
- State: BT Status = On
Task
The actions in the task turn off Bluetooth, get the current date/time, and display a notification to say Bluetooth was disabled.
- Bluetooth: Set to off
- Parse/Format DateTime: Sets current date and time into a variable with the desired format (in my case “dd MMM YYYY @ HH:mm”)
- Notify: Notifies using %now_datetime variable (set above) to display when Bluetooth was disabled
Sending location details to mapping service
I use Tasker for a several location-based tasks, this one is my favourite as when enabled it regularly reports my GPS location to a custom-coded web application that provides mapping to friends and family so they can track my location when I’m travelling to/from them (saving on-the-road calls for updates). This is a good example of where combining Tasker with web developed apps can create truly useful functionality for relatively low effort.
Profile
The profile is enabled manually when I want to start tracking. It therefore uses a single time-based condition to trigger every 8 minutes (a figure that has evolved from experimenting to get a balance of regular updates without drawing too many pins on a map!).
- Time: From midnight to midnight, every 8 minutes
Task
The actions in the task capture my current location and associated details, if not captured in the last 5 minutes by the device for other reasons, the battery is not close to dying (5%). They then authenticate to a private URL and submit details on my location before raising a notification with sound to let me know whether it was successful. As I drive along I can hear short sounds to signal success or failure of submissions.
Below is a trimmed version of my actions to give you an idea of the core actions used to achieve this:
- Get Location v2: Get location if %TIMES – %gl_time_seconds > 300 and %BATT > 5
- Variable Set: Sets an %attempts variable to 1, to capture any need to retry submissions
- HTTP Auth: Holds the username and password for authentication
- HTTP Request: Posts location details to a private URL, using the authentication details from the previous step
- If: Checks for an error by checking %http_response_code is not equal to 200 (200 is a successful response) and %attempts is less than 11 (allowing up to a maximum of 10 retries)
- Notify: Notifies me (no sound) of the failure to submit details
- Wait: Waits 10 seconds to give time for signal issues etc to recover
- Goto: Returns the code to the Get Location v2 action to reattempt
- If: Checks for an error by checking %http_response_code is not equal to 200 (200 is a successful response)
- Music Play: Plays a brief sound that I recognise as a failure
- Notify: Notifies me of the failure to submit details
- If: Checks for a successful submission by checking %http_response_code is equal to 200 (200 is a successful response)
- Music Play: Plays a brief sound that I recognise as a success
- Notify: Notifies me of the successful submission of details
Conclusion
Tasker is a powerful and versatile automation tool that can transform the way you use your Android device. By leveraging its wide range of features and capabilities, you can automate mundane tasks, enhance productivity, and create a more efficient and fun digital life. Whether you’re a novice looking to simplify your daily routine or an advanced user seeking to push the boundaries of automation, Tasker has something to offer for everyone.
I particularly recommend Tasker to anyone that enjoys developing or simple problem-solving to unlock the full potential of your Android device.
For more profile ideas, you can visit Tasker’s official task-sharing community Tasker Net for pre-made tasks and profiles created by other users.