Ifttt on Android

I spent a few hours the other night playing with IFTTT on my Android phone. The reason was they recently released an Android App.

What is IFTTT?

Since I don’t know that I’ve ever talked about IFTTT on here, it stands for If this then that. For instance, you could use the Date/Time “trigger” to say If it is 10AM, Then send me an SMS (or other notification) checking in on whether I’m being productive at work. (This is a possible use I’ve adopted and adapted from Tim Ferriss’ 4-Hour Workweek.) Basically the service is made up of Channels (basically things you can interact with like facebook, twitter, SMS, or even physical things like your lights) which have Triggers. You subscribe to the channel, add “Recipes” of what you want done when that trigger happens, and then you set it to run. If you want their (better) description, check out this page that talks about IFTTT.

New Channels

One of the main reasons I spent a bunch of time playing was the sudden availability of new channels. When you add an Android device you have access to “Android Location” “Android Notifications”, “Android Phone Call”, “Android Photos”, and “Android SMS”. I haven’t played with them all but I am excited for all of the possibilities.

Summary

I still haven’t been able to get all of the triggers to work yet (location seems to be an issue…) and there isn’t much on the way of documentation, but I’m hoping that over time these things will become more and more useful for me. If you’ve never checked out IFTTT I suggest you had better head over to ifttt.com and see what you can do with it.