Google Tasks will make it easier to highlight your most urgent errands

Google Tasks on S9 Plus
Google Tasks on S9 Plus (Image credit: Android Central)

What you need to know

  • A new APK teardown revealed a new Google Tasks feature to label important tasks with a star button.
  • The upcoming change will let you view all of your starred tasks under a dedicated tab.
  • It remains unclear when the new feature will roll out publicly.

Google Tasks is one of the best to-do apps for Android that don't often get a lot of love from the company despite the great productivity benefits it offers to users. Now, the folks over at XDA Developers have discovered an unreleased feature in the app that should make sorting through your most important chores a breeze.

According to the site's APK teardown, the app is about to pick up a new feature that will allow you to mark important tasks with a star button that sits to the right of each item in your list. Once you've starred a task, it will be automatically added to the "Starred" tab pinned to the top left corner of Tasks.

The tabbed interface is the most recent makeover introduced to the app earlier this month to provide a better way of managing your lists. Before that, you needed to tap the hamburger menu in order to pull up your lists.

With the upcoming star button, you can quickly access the chores you want to complete first through a dedicated tab, although they will remain in their original lists. There are two methods you can star a task: you can tap the star button when you create a task or after adding an item to a list. Additionally, you can directly add tasks to the Starred tab.

That said, starred tasks aren't anything new. Microsoft's To Do app has long had this feature, so Tasks is only playing catch-up here. Nonetheless, it's a welcome addition to Tasks, although it's not available to the public just yet.

Jay Bonggolto
News Writer & Reviewer

Jay Bonggolto always keeps a nose for news. He has been writing about consumer tech and apps for as long as he can remember, and he has used a variety of Android phones since falling in love with Jelly Bean. Send him a direct message via Twitter or LinkedIn.