Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google Calendar appears to be duplicating Google Tasks functionality.
- Calendar is working on support for directly handling subtasks and lists.
- It’s possible we could one day see Calendar begin to replace the dedicated Tasks app.
Google sure seems to enjoy a little redundancy when it comes to its app and services. Oftentimes, that takes the form of integrating functionality from one into another; how many different ways do we already have to access Search? Today we’re checking out one development along those lines that’s causing us to raise an eyebrow a bit, as we spot signs of Google Calendar learning to do more and more of what the Tasks app does now.
An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
We’re looking at the new 2024.42.0-687921584-release build of the Calendar app, and while you won’t see any of this yourself just yet, Google’s started work at integrating a lot of Tasks functionality directly into the app. So far, while Calendar is aware of tasks created by the Tasks app, its support has been somewhat limited, and if you wanted to do anything like work with subtasks, Calendar would point you in the direction of the main app.
You can see this existing option on the left. But after the changes Google’s been working on here go live, Calendar could start letting you work with tasks on a much deeper level, including editing subtasks, like we have here on the right. We also see a new interface for managing the lists tasks can live in that matches what we’re used to from the Tasks app itself.
In fact, the more we think about it — with Calendar adding all this, is there going to be any point to the primary Tasks app anymore? It was already a bit one-note to begin with, and considering how it’s used, it would make a ton of practical sense to build its task management into a broader organization app — kinda like Calendar, maybe? There still feels like there’s more work to be done here, especially in terms of fleshing out tools for subtasks throughout Calendar, but there’s definitely some momentum to these additions.
Now, we can’t say that with any real certainty just yet, nor make much of a prediction for when Google might want to make a big change like that. We also can’t just ignore signs that might suggest this isn’t happening, like how we’ve been tracking plenty of active development work for Tasks lately, including its new Gemini extensions — why build those if you’re just about to kill the app?
For now, this mystery will have to say open-ended, but we’ll keep looking through Google’s app updates and see if we can’t get more of a sense for the company’s likely intentions.
