Official IFTTT integration

[jay (support)]

We're looking for feedback from the community concerning an official IFTTT integration. We just posted a simple how-to outlining how to use the HTTP API to get IFTTT to send commands to Indigo (turn on a light, set a variable, execute an action group, etc). This is, obviously, a one-way integration (IFTTT->Indigo).

Our question is how much interest there would be in an official IFTTT integration. It would be a full integration: Indigo could send triggering events to IFTTT (device changes, variable changes, etc), IFTTT could get lists of devices, variables, etc, and you could send commands to Indigo. It would authenticate via OAuth (like the Alexa plugin) so you wouldn't have to enter credentials and setup would be automatic.

So, just let us know your level of interest. We're only going to leave this poll open for about a month.

[MODERATOR NOTE]: sorry for the poor appearance of the poll, apparently something broke our theme.

Part of what brought me to Indigo was how terrible my experience with IFTTT was. It was (theoretically) an integral part of my SmartThings setup.

I say theoretically because it was just never, ever reliable, and importantly, there was in essence no way at all to troubleshoot anything that was supposed to be happening on IFTTT’s end.

There was initial pain in moving away from ST and IFTTT, but most of that pain was focused on the loss of Zigbee device compatibility. By the time I switched to Indigo, I had already removed most IFTTT stuff from my setup because it was just useless.

I don’t miss it and would not consider adding it back in to my setup, even now when I have rock solid fiber internet.

I agree with DC and whilst it might be useful for the odd edge case I can’t see how that ever takes priority over the more core functionality that needs development, ie new devices and protocols, improved touch app, matter…

IFTTT still exists? Meh.. I agree with above.. I don’t really see any point In integration with such a system. Especially what with their bait and switch tactics they used when they started charging.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

[jay (support)]

Especially what with their bait and switch tactics they used when they started charging.

Please don't take this as defense of IFTTT, but only as an explanation of why they had to start charging users (at least as far as I understand it):

Their original plan to make money was to charge companies to have their products supported on the platform. And it was super expensive because IFTTT had to build the integration themselves. They found out that while they could get larger companies on the platform, the started to stagnate pretty quickly. I never really expected this to work (and perhaps they didn't either in the longer term).

Then they introduced their API that would allow the companies to build the integration themselves. They could charge the companies less since they only had to "approve" the integrations, but it was still pretty expensive, especially for small companies like us. Given the relative lack of interest, and because we had much bigger priorities, we couldn't justify the cost.

Presumably, that didn't work either - there are only a finite number of companies supplying products that could be interesting when paired with IFTTT I guess. That's when they started charging $30 or $60/year for the wider access (and creating the restricted free level) and made adding integrations free to companies that wanted to integrate. We just heard about it, which is the reason for this poll.

I agree with DC. In theory there is value for some cases but I find IFTTT to be unreliable. Therefore I won't have any plans to use the integration if it existed.

I don't imagine I would use it, especially because I think they change their payment model a lot, but I know when I was starting out, that would've been a really big plus for me. I guess it comes down to getting new users vs keeping their existing users happy in my mind.