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Make things happen from an Android Wear watch with this app

Want to shoot a text of your location, set your Nest thermostat or generate a phone call to yourself to avoid a meeting? One tap of the DO Button on Android Wear makes it happen.
Written by Kevin Tofel, Contributor

Got an Android Wear watch? Then you can create one-touch shortcuts on it for very specific actions thanks to the folks at IFTTT, or If This, Then That.

The company launched its DO Button app earlier this year; a simple programmatical way to create actionable shortcuts. Now, the DO Button is available for Android Wear in the Google Play Store.

Think of the one-touch taps as events, similar to how IFTTT has long worked, which caused some action based on a event. You might have a notification appear on your handset, for example, when your favorite sports team scored points. The trigger event in that case would be the scoring activity and the result would be the automatic notification.

The DO Button tap is now a trigger event that makes something happen, depending on how you've configured it with an IFTTT recipe.

Here a some examples from the IFTTT team:

  • Turn on your lights with just a tap+
  • Get yourself out of awkward situations with a phonecall
  • Set your Nest Thermostat to the perfect temperature
  • Email your roommates when you're at the local grocery
  • Block off the next hour as busy in Google Calendar
  • Track your work hours in a Google Drive spreadsheet
  • Get a text with the location of where you parked the car
  • Ask colleagues on Slack if they want coffee
  • Toggle on or off most internet enabled devices
  • Tweet a map of your current location
  • Turn off your oven with a push of a button
do-for-android-wear.png

A press of the DO Button kicks off any event that the platform supports through its various channels. It's an easy way to automate actions that up to now required some other trigger event.

Since IFTTT is cloud-based -- that's where the rules and events are all stored -- it only works with connected devices. Given that an Android Wear watch is generally paired with a phone, and that many Android Wear devices also support Wi-Fi connections, that limitation shouldn't be an issue.

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