So I’d heard so many good things about IFTTT, I decided to give it a try. In short, it simply doesn’t work for me. Here’s what’s wrong.

1. Only one trigger and action per recipe. This is horribly limiting, and I don’t understand why it would be difficult to add these features. Basically, it is literally, if this, then that. But it should allow if this and this or this but not that, then that and that else that.
2. Location services trigger over and over again on my Android. I made a simple recipe for, IF Chris arrives home, THEN log the event in my automation system. It will do this, then do it 20 more times over the course of the evening with me barely even moving. Whaaaa?
3. I tried to make the Hue lights flicker when Echo’s timer goes off. This just plain didn’t work. It seems to have problems connecting to my Hue hub, even though Echo connects to it just fine.
4. I tried to get Automatic to log when I arrive and leave from work and home. This sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t, seemingly randomly.
5. The web interface for building recipes is just bizarre. “Here’s the kitchen sink! Now let’s jump 10 miles down the page! Here’s another kitchen sink full of icons! There’s nothing to do here, just push this button.”

The only successful triggers I’ve gotten to work are saving analytics data to a Google spreadsheet, which is great. And I like that it allows me to do my own HTTP commands, and does it reasonably well enough. However, the software has a lot of room for improvement, and I think I might move on to Stringify or roll my own solution if they don’t get it together.