Location Applets

By The IFTTT Team

June 24, 2021

Your phone already knows where you are, what if you made that useful?

IFTTT's Location service is the wiring that makes it possible. You draw a circle on a map, your house, the office, the gym, your parents' place, and IFTTT runs an automation when you cross the edge of that geofence, in either direction. No app to open, no button to press. You arrive, and the thing happens. This is called geofencing, and if you want the longer explanation, we wrote one: what is geofencing.

It works because the IFTTT app for iOS or Android reports your approximate location in the background. You grant the permission, you choose the locations, and you can change or revoke either whenever you want.

Start a free trial of IFTTT Pro to chain several actions to a single arrival and add conditions for time of day.

Arriving and leaving home

Start with automations that help your home feel more welcome and more secure.

Arriving is the satisfying half. Philips Hue lights come up before you're through the door. The thermostat auto-adjusts to your ideal temperature. Your phone unmutes itself so you stop missing calls all evening. Cameras that spent the day watching an empty house switch over to privacy mode.

Leaving is the half that saves you worry. Heating shuts off in a house nobody's in. Your home security system arms itself without you remembering to do it, or your garage door closes in case you forgot.

Work locations

Timesheets are the worst kind of admin: trivial in the moment, impossible to reconstruct afterward. You always mean to write it down but somehow you never do.

Location solves that by logging the thing as it happens. Enter the client's office and a calendar event starts. Leave, and it closes with the real duration attached. At the end of the month you have an actual record in Google Calendar or iOS Calendar instead of a best guess.

If you'd rather have rows than events, the same trigger can add to Google Sheets with one line for each arrival and departure that is ready to sort, total, or hand to whoever does your invoicing.

Remember important things

Having a great day until you realize you can't remember where you parked your car? It happens. Eliminate that moment with a simple button widget press that logs your location, making it easy to find your car later on. This automation can be modified and used to keep track of potential locations for a photo shoot or other event planning tasks.