IFTTT launches on Android with deeper integration than on iOS | Hacker News Reader

IFTTT launches on Android with deeper integration than on iOS

techcrunch.com

135 pointsmattty66 comments

Congrats on their big launch! This is very exciting for their Android users! I'm not going to lie, as an iOS user I'm quite jealous. Ha This gives Android users quite a bit more tiggers available for them that iOS users can't do. The iOS app can only do basic things like calendar, contacts, and photos. Things such as "sending a text as yourself", changing settings on your phone, etc. are awesome features they added for Android that I wish iOS also offered. But I do understand the nature of iOS being more locked down than Android.

Sort of off topic, but I wonder if IFTTT will ever start charging for their services. I'm a huge fan of what they do, and it surprises me that they have stayed free for this long. Similar services (more directed towards tech) like Zapier [1] have very fair pricing plans, but their free plan is so-so. I would be more than willing to pay for the awesome work that IFTTT is doing with their platform. Just wonder if they will ever introduce pricing plans into their service or not.

[1] https://zapier.com/

Hey! Great insights. I work for Zapier, so I'm totally bias. :-) I'm curious to hear more about what makes the free plan so-so?

Hey Chris! I don't want to go and derail this post, but I'd be more than happy to give you feedback if you want to email me (contact is on my HN profile)! :)

It should be possible for IFTTT to send an SMS with the user's number as sender without involving the phone at all. Which might be preferable anyway, as it doesn't rely on your phone being reachable when an event is triggered.

Not sure how much it would cost per message and whether it's feasible for a free service like IFTT, but it can be done.

Is that really possible? I've wanted to do that before and looked into Twilio but it's basically number spoofing and would make spamming people far too easy.

If you've found a way, I'd love to hear it

There are services that can do this (Skype, for example) but on closer inspection, looks like it's not allowed in some territories (including the US).

https://support.skype.com/en/faq/FA672/how-do-i-show-my-mobi...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS_spoofing

Twilio lets you deliver SMS from a number other than your Twilio number. The one caveat is that you need to have Twilio verify the external number first, two-factor auth style.

EDIT: Oops, apparently this is only for voice calling: http://www.twilio.com/help/faq/phone-numbers/whats-the-diffe...

You are unable to spoof SMS numbers. Twilio has documentation on this if you'd like more info (experience: I tried, so I could SMS birthday messages to my contacts without remembering, but having it look like it came from me).

You're absolutely able to spoof SMS numbers from a technical standpoint, but you'll have to go straight to an SMSC or aggregator that lets you do it.

I haven't checked in years, but we had to write an SMPP library to pull it off. That sucked.

I should have qualified my statement.

I use IFTTT to send myself multiple text messages a day, to which I respond and log the results in a Google Doc spreadsheet. Each month I blast past the 100 message limit. I've asked IFTTT to let me pay them for more messages but they said no.

Use Twilio, and have a stub of code inject your responses into your Google Docs spreadsheet. 1 penny per text message they receive for you, $1/month for the number.

Here, just found this blog post via the googles:

https://www.twilio.com/blog/2012/11/connecting-twilio-sms-to...

https://github.com/jpf/TwilioSheet

Thanks! This may be the impetus I've been waiting for to make the switch.

No problem. Working on getting you a promo code so your number and a bucket of texts are free for testing.

To clarify, you are blocked from sending over 100? Or you are going over said "limit" anyway?

It's available now. Am I missing something or is there no login button? I only get an option to register.

Edit: Installed it on another device and the app only says "Hello world!". Seems like the Play Store distributes different versions for smartphones and tablets.

Edit 2: The login button is cut off on my phone because they failed to put the login/register screen into a ScrollView.

Edit 3: Also the positioning of the loading indicator is weird: http://imgur.com/jp6wtIA

We're on top of both issues, stay tuned to the store for an update!

Will there be calendar functionality beyond google calendar? I would love to be able to use my caldav/fruux calendars with IFTTT. I saw a tweet from the folks over at fruux who mentioned willingness to help out wit that.

Android stuff really starts to shine when you hit the "deep" system modifications, and makes me glad I'm not iOS.

Things we get in android that iOS users :

- Pushbullet

- Cover

- Fullfeatured chat heads in Facebook messanger(overlaid on any app)

- This

Congrats to IFTTT and Jordan Beck for shipping this product. I'm seeing more and more apps on iOS which are ported to Android only to be met by an incumbent app that is on par or superior to the iOS offering. I love IFTTT but the iOS restrictions make it difficult to enable the types of recipes I really want to create.

I think that's more of the fault of iOS, not IFTTT though right? I mean iOS only gives an app access to so much, where as Android apps can get all those access from the get go. I'm not 100% sure how permissions work for iOS, but I have a feeling it's more locked down that you would have to be a partner with Apple to get the type of permissions they allow on Android devices by default.

Yeah I agree with you. iOS is pretty locked down compared to Android and I'm not sure if even a partnership would help. Unless your a company the size of Google, Apple will probably just swallow you whole.

Let us all remember that the blame for those iOS IFTTT limitations resides entirely with Apple. IFTTT have done the best they can (and it's still pretty great).

The tradeoff one makes when submitting to iOS is one that should be more publicized than it currently is.

As an Android user, I have one question:

How does IFTTT compare to Tasker?

Functionality-wise it's going to be far more limited, but I think for the things it can do, it will be much much simpler to set up.

IFTTT is more web+data oriented - e.g. sharing pics, location, etc. + actions based on them. Look at the featured recipes.

Tasker is for your inner geek to control your phone like you would with a shell script - volume, wifi, etc. to name a few.

From poking around with IFTTT a bit today, Tasker is way more advanced in terms of what you can do with your device (settings, launching other apps, phone specific stuff) but the UI is very complicated and confusing. IFTTT's UI is really nice and has more integration with web services and popular social apps (Twitter, Instagram, etc), but the device integrations are pretty limited.

I imagine as IFTTT continues building they will add more device integrations - at which point I'd happily switch from Tasker.

Llama on Android also has a simpler UI and is Free opposed to Tasker.

I believe between Llama & IFTTT you should be able to do pretty much everything that Tasker can do.

IFTTT deals directly with hooks that web/hardware/data services provide. Think of it less of a tasker for your phone (linking events on your phone) and more of a simple tasker that links web apps/services(often without even passing through your phone). So, it will not have nearly the amount of control that Tasker has on your phone, but also does somethings that would be less possible or more complicated with tasker. Give this page a look to get an idea of the breadth of recipies: https://ifttt.com/recipes

These new generation of applications with deeper integration on Android have become my favorite feature of Android. Facebook's chat head, LastPass's Fill into the Apps, etc. completely changes how you use your smart devices.

Try LinkBubble also, if you haven't already. I agree that we're finally starting to see talented devs really take advantage of the extra freedom Android gives them to extend the platform. From where I sit there's a lot more innovation happening in apps on the Android side now and the quality gap has closed in most cases.

I can install it on my Nexus 4, but not my Nexus 7 (2013), despite it clearly being tablet optimized. What's up with that?

They might want to check the Google Play Store, because all the links show nothing: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ifttt.iftt...

yeah, seems like the press release was a tad premature, or the Google Play publishing took a bit longer than expected. I'm anxious to try it out...

We're on it, get an email as soon as it's live: http://ift.tt/updates

This is a bit of a tangent, but does anyone know a reliable way to download and install Android APKs from the Play store for a device that does not have Google Play itself installed (and intentionally does not have a Google account associated with it)?

Is this what you are looking for:

http://apps.evozi.com/apk-downloader/

That's a web-based version of https://lekensteyn.nl/apk-downloader/ , and according to that site it adds spyware. Considering that the site you linked has pop-up ads for dubious downloads, that seems likely.

In any case, both of those still require having the Android device registered with a Google account.

"In any case, both of those still require having the Android device registered with a Google account."

Not exactly. They require having _an_ Android device registered. As long as you've once registered a device, it will stay associated with your account. It doesn't have to be the same device as the one onto which you want to install the downloaded APK.

Wow, I had no idea about the spyware. I learned about Evozi from: http://www.labnol.org/internet/download-apk-from-google-play...

That labnol site has some great tips, and is well written, so I trust things I find there.

Thank you for the information. According to the linked XDA discussion:

"Evozi's fork is based on opensource 1.4.x, with tracking code and removes validation for undownloadable APKs as a fix for new play store. Besides this, it also removes the copyright header of background.js, adds more tracking and some textual changes (adding links to his own apps and social accounts)."

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=44032616&post...

I'm trying to understand what this means. Does it mean that evozi has added spyware to the apks I've downloaded? I've used this to get all the apps that were not in F-droid, so I'm quite concerned.

If you have access to a rooted Android device with Play, you can pull the APKs out of the /data/app directory with adb. Not all apps are usable this way, they could be locked to a Play account, but I don't think many free apps bother with that.

I just installed it on my iPhone 5s, iOS 7.0.4. Already had an account, I knew what was all the fuss about and I went my way and create a new receipe using my device delicious new "this" or "then" !

So it goes : "if any new photo taken with front camera then add file from URL to marcelftw's Dropbox".

I took several photos, but the receipe has never been triggered :( I'm a bit confused. So I went and edit the dropbox actions. So it saves photos in "selfies" with file name has "selfie-{{TakenDate}}". And the "Check Now" says everything is alright.

To be honest, it's not that hard to have deeper integration than on iOS.

Hm, I installed it on my Android and now my recipes in the web interface are gone. I have logged in from different browser to their web and got "something is not working" error.

Any plans for download integration? I'd love to see ifttt rules like "when I add a YouTube video to Watch Later, download it to my device next time I'm on Wifi".

Workaround: IFTTT provides an option to download a file to, for example, Dropbox (note: be aware of file size limit). One can use his/her server with script which streams video (or anything else) based on the source URL to make video/audio/whatever downloadable. Then Android device just syncs and voilà!

Looks like a rough launch. When I should have gotten a message that my registration was ok I got a timeout.

Not sure if the app was supposed to ask me more questions after an OK registration, when I tried to re-register and got "this username is taken", I tried to login and that worked. Found myself subscribed to a bunch of semi-random channels.

While exploring tasks, I started getting more timeouts.

Will IFTTT have traffic triggers in the future? I've been wanting a way to get traffic alerts before leaving work for years. I've found a few places that offer it, but nothing has been reliable.

In a perfect world I'd tie traffic conditions to when my alarm clock wakes me up!

You could write your own traffic RSS feed and use that as a trigger.

I've worked around this by setting a reoccurring meeting to go home with my address in Google Calendar, my phone tells me beforehand when I need to leave in order to get home on time. I don't know if it includes traffic in its estimates but I've never been late (give or take a couple minutes).

Doesn't Google Now sort of offer that functionality (I take the train so it doesn't tell me that but it always tells me the distance to home/some event/work)

This looks promising. I've got several IFTTT recipes in mind that I'd like to try out when they support my phone.

Unfortunately my Facebook related recipes never go quite so well, but I think that's Facebook's fault really.

I absolutely love the slideshow introduction leading to a login. It's like a feature funnel I suppose versus a sales funnel, pre-selling me to take the time to create credentials. Kudos +1

Can't even login to the main site now, must be getting hammered.

Any IFTTT recipes for sending a text when you're within a certain radius of a target? That'd be nice.

You can make one easily enough. There is a location trigger and you can scale the distance. It may not be as precise as you'd like and the smallest zone was still pretty large.

Wow, and just this week, I installed Pushbullet to handle getting notifications from IFTTT to my Android phone. Oh well, I will continue to use Pushbullet, and this is still good news.

Hmm, it's crashing on a fresh install of Cyanogenmod. I can't blame them too much for that, though.

Item isn't available on Play Store. I guess they removed it.

Not removed, just not there yet. Get an email as soon as it's live: http://ift.tt/updates

best dogfooding ever.

Worked for me and installed.

Getting not found on the link as well. Not that it would be worth anything anyway. Android has long had apps for this such as Locale (around since the very early Android Developer Challenges) and Tasker. They must know someone at TechCrunch to get such a favorable write up for a clone.

I tried Tasker. It's a usability nightmare. A perfect example of the bad Android UI that people stereotype (despite many Android apps having fantastic UI these days).

It also costs money. IFTTT appears to be free, and has a large community built around it. Just because it has some similar functionality to Tasker (and much else besides) doesn't make it a "clone".

As far as I can tell, neither Locale or Tasker are competitors to IFTTT. While IFTTT can do things like silence your phone based on location, that's not its selling point.

What IFTTT does is let you set up connections between services. You can trigger actions on other services based on something the phone does (indicate missed calls with Hue light bulbs, automatically share photos taken at a particular location to a flickr album) or take actions on the phone based on input from external services (get a notification when an apartment fitting your criteria shows up on craigslist, or set background photos from your instagram feed).

I don't know of any similar services that hook into anywhere close to IFTTT's variety of inputs or outputs.

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