Syncing of subtasks between Nextcloud and Android

Since a long time I am looking for a method to sync subtasks between my Nextcloud and my Android phone.
I am using the standard Tasks app of Nextcloud and tried different Android apps (including OpenTasks and Astrid To-Do List Clone.
None of these combinations work for syncing subtasks correctly. Apparently all of the three apps seem to use different methods to display and store subtasks.

My question:
Is there seriously no working method (yet) to sync subtasks between NC and Android??

Nextcloud:

Opentasks:

Astrid-To-Do-List-Clone:

@raimund-schluessler , can you help?

I am not aware of any app on Android that supports subtasks properly.

Opentasks misuses the description field of a task and renders - [ ] Subtask as a subtask. This is why you see this in the description field of the task in the details view of the Tasks app. Version v0.10.0 of the Tasks app will render markdown in the description field, so you will see this string as a checkbox at least.

I don’t know how Astrid-To-Do-List does it, but they seem to use something proprietary as well. You could check how they do it, by having a look at the CalDAV data of the respective task (can’t do this myself, since I don’t have an Android phone).

The proper way to support Subtasks following the CalDAV standard is to use the related-to field, which is what the Tasks app does. This was also proposed for the Astrid clone (see https://github.com/tasks/tasks/issues/552#issuecomment-432840987), but it didn’t get very far yet.

So in conclusion, the Android apps have to support it properly.

It might be worse to mention, that support for sub tasks is also planned to be implemented in OpenTasks. Here are the issue tickets which are covering this request:


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Thank you. I can’t wait till subtasks are implemented correctly in OpenTasks!

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Tasks (Astrid clone) now supports subtasks using the RELATED-TO field. This functionality is currently in beta

Links:

  • Install Tasks from the Play Store
  • Sign up for beta testing
  • The final release will be available in the F-Droid repository here
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Tried Tasks from the Play Store. Subtasks - I love the feature - work well even though one cannot change an outline level in this beta phase.

All in all this app is as fast and UX is at least as effective as in Opentasks, but it can be customized much more extensively. It also does not need DavX for syncing which actually has a positive effect on battery.

After trying I changed back to the F-Droid version (even though it is possible to opt out of being tracked in the Play version, as well). Really looking forward to the subtask version there and will definitely donate.

P.S. @abaker, does the caldav have resources to allow manual ordering of tasks? In Nextcloud Tasks this is not possible, to my knowledge, which makes it impossible to use for (light) outlining. However, such a feature would come in handy occassionally, in my opinion.

Thanks for the feedback!

It is not obvious, but you can drag and drop to indent tasks, similar to the functionality in Nextcloud’s Tasks.

CalDAV does not provide a field for manual ordering, however if this gets merged then I will probably add support for x-apple-sort-order as well

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Let’s hope the best for #237!

Sorry for not noticing the drag and drop. Didn’t touch the task long/shortly enough, probably.

I noticed Tasks includes also time tracking for tasks. Is there a way to export a tracking report editable on a PC?

Up until now I’ve been very pleased with my previous time tracker (win+And.), but I recently found about it uses quite many trackers and am looking for an alternative.

Thanks a lot, @abaker!
So finally we have a solution here!

Works perfectly fine! :star_struck:

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Hi, I started with tasks.org as standalone app on Android and want to sync with nextcloud using the Davx synchronization. The sync works as I can see the nextcloud tasks in the android app. But the nextcloud tasks are encapsulated in my email address and are not shown next to my other tasks. Saying this the tasks I had in tasks.org app aren’t synched with nextcloud. Is there any hint how I can get this running?