Google’s API changes will kill off some IFTTT functionality

Gmail users who like to wring every feature out of the service haven’t had a great week.

Earlier this week, Google harshly reminded Inbox by Gmail users that the productivity-focused app would shut down soon. Then on Thursday, If This Then That, or IFTTT, sent an email alert to users letting them know that a number of actions related to Gmail will no longer work at the end of March.

For the uninitiated, IFTTT is a free service that lets people use simple web commands called applets. For example, one of the Gmail applets advertised on the IFTTT website will send an “I’m running late!” message to several people who might need to know with the press of a button. It’s basically a way to keep your online life in order by automating things you would otherwise have to do manually. 

Every Gmail trigger in IFTTT except “send an email” and “send yourself an email” will be disabled on March 31.

In a longer blog post on its website, IFTTT explained that maintaining these actions in the face of upcoming Google API changes would have been difficult. Google announced the changes back in October to give developers time to comply with them. 

“The changes being made to Gmail would have required massive refactoring in how we integrated Gmail with the IFTTT platform. It would have created a lot more overhead than we had before, and the experience for users would have been degraded as a result,” IFTTT’s blog post said. “These updates would have made continuing to maintain the Gmail service unsustainable.”

The end of March and beginning of April will be a bit of transitional period for Google apps and services. As mentioned above, Inbox by Gmail is shutting down on April 2 as Google will consolidate its email userbase into the central Gmail app. On the same day, the long-running and under-supported social network Google+ will finally shut down.