IFTTT Building an Applet on iPhone — Triggers

Trigger Set up

When you are presented with the Applet building page in the App after you select Create you will most likely see an empty page with two sections. The first section is the trigger part of the Applet automation. This is highlighted and labelled “If This”. Clicking on the Add button next to this will present you the Services page where you can search, browse and choose the service you want as a trigger.

The services listed here will only be the ones that have trigger options.

When you select a service you will go to its page where it will list all the possible triggers for that service. The name of the trigger and the description of that trigger. You are also presented with an option to suggest new triggers in the case of not seeing what you want.

Real Time

Triggers actually come in two types. The first type is the real time trigger. This is where the service used will tell IFTTT that event has happened. How often and how fast this happens will be internal to that third party service but when they notify IFTTT then IFTTT’s Applets will respond in the scale of a few seconds.

Polling

The other type of trigger is a polling trigger. This is where IFTTT has to reach out to the third party service to query it every so often to check if that trigger condition has happened. When you build an Applet it will tell you if it’s a real time or polling type of Applet (because of the type of trigger used). In this case the timing will depend on the plan you’re on. Free plan polling happens ever hour, but on the paid plans it’s every 5 minutes.

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