Tasker yanked from Google Play
Tasker has been yanked from the Play Store with the warning given to the developer that it’s a dangerous product due to potential for abuse of optimizations for Doze Mode on Android Marshmallow. What’s interesting is the warning is about a version that’s not in the Tasker that was posted to Play but about a beta being worked on.
You can still download Tasker here while they try and figure out what’s going on, although those versions expire after seven days, however they may perform a license check (unknown,) so if you’ve purchased before there’s a chance it will work. Or there’s a chance you’ll have to reinstall in seven days.
How can an unpublished app cause a published one to be yanked is what’s interesting here, and I’m going entirely by the Android Police article here so hopefully they got the right info from the horse’s mouth. The current theory is that either a beta user of a Tasker with the bad permission submitted a bug report that brought the manifest permission to Google’s attention, or that the on device app verification caught it.
Either way it may change how developers have to operate betas in the future because if your privately distributed beta is flagged as dangerous your perfectly legit gamma could be yanked, and that’s a problem as betas are notoriously buggy and pre-compliant.
There’s nothing I can locate on the Tasker site as to why it was removed, although there are some comments in the Tasker Forum on Google Groups.
[Android Police]
