An overview of Tasker

These are two cool android apps. But they are paid apps. However, I think buying them would prove worthy - you won't regret it. They help in a lot of home automation use cases.

What is Tasker?

This android app helps us to automate many aspects of the android phone. For e.g.

1. Automatically turn down brightness from 9pm to 7am, and, put the phone in silent mode, and, also turn on dark mode on the phone.
2. You can program your phone to show you a popup message with the content from an SMS received from your loved one...
3. You can make tasker search your sms and report your latest bank balance!

How does tasker do this?

Sparing all the intricate details, there are three high-level concepts at work...

1. Actions
2. Tasks
3. Profiles

Tasker Actions

They are what they are - actions. An action is something tasker can do. It can be broadly classified into three categories:

1. Actions that change some system setting or state. For e.g. set volume level, reject call, running an app, writing to a file, setting the alarm, clearing notifications, etc...
2. Actions that can help in networking. For e.g. make http requests, or, mqtt, etc.
3. Actions meant for notifications or interactions - toast messages, creating notifications, vibrating the phone, popups, etc.

So actions in a way are basic - they do one thing.

Tasker Tasks

A task combines multiple actions.

Tasker allows you to run tasks standalone or via means of a profile which is explained in the next section.

When running standalone tasker allows you to make shortcuts (or widgets) that you can place in your home screen. This is powerful - imagine having a task that can for instance talk to your home automation system and toggle your living room light switch...now you are controlling your living room light with your phone!!!

Tasker Profiles

A profile is a context for a task to run. A profile could be a combination of an event (like SMS message received), phone gesture, time, battery level, etc...For e.g. if you wanted your phone to turn on darkmode everday after 9pm you'd use a profile with one such "time" constraint. The associated task is the one that does the corresponding action. So as far as this small example goes, the profile is what triggered the specific task.

Tasker Plugins

Tasker has a finite set of actions and profile events. They can be extended with something called Tasker Plugins. For e.g. mqtt is something tasker doesn't provide out-of-the-box. However, there are tasker plugins which enable that feature for you. Now if you needed to send a mqtt message to some other device, you can find that specific action...Similarly tasker can respond to mqtt messages as well. There are plugins that enable this specific feature alone.

AutoApps

This is another app by the same developer. There are a number of tasker (3-rd party) plugins available today. This is a one-stop interface to get all those official tasker plugins.

Conclusion

I do recommend you explore this app. You will get hooked on to it very quickly.