Today I worked through the setup required to create Google Tasks electronically through the Google Tasks API.

The process involved:

• setting up access in Google Cloud Console
• enabling the Google Tasks API
• configuring authentication
• writing the integration code
• testing task creation through the API

After that setup, I was able to create a task successfully.

The next step was to create a task with a due time. That did not work.

The Google Tasks API has a due field, but according to Google’s own documentation, it only stores the date portion. The time portion is discarded. The API also cannot read or write the time that appears in the Google Tasks interface.

Official documentation:
Google Tasks API – Task resource

That is frustrating.

What makes this more surprising is that this appears to be a long-standing limitation. Developers using different Google integrations have run into this for years. Instead of the API being updated to support the same behavior as the user interface, the limitation is documented as expected behavior.

For a company like Google, that feels hard to justify.

The task creation part works. The API can create tasks electronically. But if your workflow depends on precise due times, the Google Tasks API does not currently support that properly.