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Tasker developer João Dias just demonstrated a wide range of S Pen hacks allowing you to essentially customize Air Gestures. As illustrated in the video below, the popular automation app can intercept S Pen events. Meaning pretty much any imaginable stylus gesture Samsung thought of is now yours for customization.
The app achieves this by intercepting system events unique to Samsung’s stylus. Better yet, this functionality is fully in line with Tasker’s root-free fundamentals. Its only requirement is granting Tasker access to read Android system logs. We won’t get tangled up in ADB setup details here, but once you have the shell up and running on Windows, you’ll need only two commands: “adb shell pm grant net.dinglisch.android.taskerm android.permission.READ_LOGS” and “adb shell am force-stop net.dinglisch.android.taskerm.”
From there, you can create an unlimited number of custom S Pen gesture profiles. Any item listed under the Air Gestures submenu of the system Settings app is yours to customize. The only limiting factor is that this feature likely won’t work on any custom ROM. At least for the time being. Also, as Air Gestures are tied to 3D gyroscope support, these S Pen hacks will only work on 2019 and this year’s iterations of Samsung’s stylus.
With this addition, Tasker lets newer S Pen models live up to their magic wand-like potential. The thing Samsung has been propping up for years, despite struggling to deliver anything resembling a non-gimmicky experience. The current version of the app allows you to intercept pretty much any Air Gesture and tie it to over 350 custom actions. From launching specific apps to executing macros, controling IoT devices, and everything in between.
S Pen hacks are just the tip of the Tasker iceberg
Detailed instructions on how to add this layer of customizability to your Galaxy Note are available in the above video’s description. Together with a link to an example S Pen gesture project, just in case you need some inspiration. Once more custom ROMs based on One UI 2.5 and later OS versions become available, this Tasker capability should see much wider use. Right now, the crowd most likely to tinker with Air Gestures is also the one least likely to be running a stock One UI experience.
In any case, this is just the latest example of Tasker’s incredible versatility that hundreds of thousands of users have been enjoying for over a decade by now. Since 2009, to be more precise, when Tasker was originally ported to Android from Palm OS.
At $3.49, Tasker offers one of the biggest bangs for your buck on the entire Google Play Store. And there’s even a free seven-day trial on the app’s official website, in case you’re feeling particularly skeptical today.