Automations for Android

Android gives you more control over your phone than just about any other device you own, with permissions you can actually set, defaults you can actually change, and a home screen you can rearrange. So why are you still doing all the work?

Consider actions you take every day. You mute your ringer at bedtime and unmute it in the morning. You screenshot a confirmation number and then email it to yourself so you can find it later. It's fine to handle manually, but what if it just...happened.

That's what IFTTT does. IFTTT connects your Android device to the apps and services you already use, so your phone reacts to different triggers as they happen. Your wallpaper refreshes itself, your texts trigger your smart lights, your photos back themselves up the tap the shutter button.

There's an Android service for nearly every part of your phone, from Android Device, Android SMS, Android Photos, Android Phone Call, Android Battery, and Wear OS, plus customizable widgets that run an automation on a single tap.

Start a free trial of IFTTT Pro to build multi-action Applets, add filter code and queries, and shape automations around your exact routine.

Top Android Applets

If you only turn on a few Applets, start here. These are the ones Android users reach for most, and between them they cover the wide variety of needs: a ringer that silences itself at bedtime, a wallpaper that swaps to NASA's image of the day, music that starts from a single button tap, and an emergency volume override for when your phone is lost somewhere in the house.

Each Applet takes about thirty seconds to set up, and none of them ask you to change how you use your phone.

Android SMS

Text messages are the one notification most people still actually read, which makes SMS useful both when you send a receive messages.

As a trigger, a keyword in an incoming message can do almost anything. Text yourself #playmusic and playback starts. Text a code word to a phone you've misplaced and the ringer jumps to full volume, even if you left it on silent. Because it runs over SMS rather than data, it keeps working in places where your signal is bad.

As an action, Android SMS handles the "let people know" part of your day without you typing it out. Leave work and your partner gets a heads up. Miss a call and the caller gets a reply. Battery drops below 15% and someone knows why you're about to go quiet.

It also pairs well with the tools you already use. Android SMS and Slack keeps work texts in a channel your team can see, and a message from a specific contact can blink your Philips Hue lights from across the room. For more in this vein, see our roundup of SMS automations for helpful notifications.

Android Photos

Your camera roll is the least organized folder you own, and it's also the one holding things you can't replace.

Android Photos fires every time you take a photo or a screenshot, which means you can sort things the moment they're created instead of six months later when you're hunting for them. New photos copy themselves to cloud storage right away. Shots that land in a specific album go somewhere your family can see them.

Screenshot a boarding pass, a parking spot, a wifi password, a confirmation number, and it arrives in your Email where you can easily reference it later, without scrolling through thousands of pictures.

Living with more than one phone, or switching between platforms? Android photos can drop into an iOS Photos album automatically, and they can show up on a Wear OS watch face too.

Android Phone Call

Missed calls are easy to lose track of. The notification gets swiped away with everything else, the callback never happens, and you find out two days later that it mattered.

Android Phone Call triggers on incoming, missed, and completed calls, so you can build the follow-up into the call itself rather than relying on memory. The most popular version is also the simplest: miss a call, and a text goes out automatically letting the person know you'll ring back.

Android Battery

Android Battery triggers when your charge drops below a threshold you set, when charging starts, and when it finishes. That's enough to build a small safety net around the phone: a text to someone when you're about to lose power, a ringer that mutes itself the moment the phone goes on the bedside charger, a nudge when charging is done so it isn't sitting at 100% all night.

Android Device

Android Device is the big one. It reaches the settings you'd otherwise dig through menus to find like ringer volume, wifi, bluetooth, wallpaper, app notifications, and lets your location, your network, or another service decide when they change.

The pattern that pays off fastest is context. Connect to the office wifi and your phone drops to vibrate on its own. Arrive home and the ringer comes back up, the lights come on, and Android Device and Wyze can switch your camera off. Disconnect from wifi when you weren't expecting to and you get a notification, which is a surprisingly good early warning that your internet has gone down.

App notifications are the other half of this service. Android will hand any app's notification over to IFTTT, so alerts you'd otherwise miss can be routed somewhere you'll actually see them: a Telegram chat, an email, a running log. If your notification shade is a lost cause, start with optimizing your notifications.

Wear OS

A watch is the right screen for a small amount of information at exactly the right moment, and the wrong screen for anything else. Wear OS on IFTTT works best when you respect that.

The most practical Applet here is the disconnect alert. Your watch buzzes the moment it loses contact with your phone, which is how you find out you left the phone on the restaurant table while you're still in the parking lot rather than the next morning.

Beyond that it's a matter of pushing only what's worth a glance: a photo, a reminder, a heads up that something at home changed. Anything that needs more than a second of your attention belongs on the phone.

Widgets

Not everything should be automatic. Some things you want to happen exactly when you say so, and that's what widgets are for.

The Button widget, Note widget, and Camera widget sit on your Android home screen and run an Applet the moment you tap them. One tap toggles the lights. One tap starts the robot vacuum. One tap sends a photo to a group chat, or drops a note into your inbox before you lose the thought.

This is the quickest way to replace an entire app with a single icon. If you've got a smart home, a row of widgets beats opening four different apps to do four small things. Our Android widgets guide walks through setup, and the full widget collection has plenty more to pick from.

Build your own

The Applets above are a starting point, not a ceiling. Every Android trigger works with every other service on IFTTT, so if there's something your phone does that you'd rather it did by itself, you can usually put it together in a few minutes: pick a trigger, pick an action, and add a filter if you want to get specific about timing or conditions.