But Do Button, Do Camera and Do Note are just early steps towards the operating system of the future says CEO Linden Tibbets

Internet firm IFTTT has launched three smartphone apps under a new brand, Do, while renaming its original application as IF.

The new apps – Do Button, Do Camera and Do Note – have been released for iOS and Android devices, with the aim of providing faster shortcuts to people’s regular digital tasks.

The apps build on IFTTT’s original service, which connects to various other apps and sites and helps people create “recipes” to make them work better together: “if I upload a photo to Facebook, then back it up to Dropbox” and so on.

“IFTTT has been about helping people automate things, and making connections that work for you in the background. It’s been very background and automation oriented, but the next set of products is moving to the foreground,” IFTT’s chief executive Linden Tibbets told the Guardian.

“It’s about helping people take action, and do just what they want to do with the services and devices that they’ve already surrounded themselves with.”

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Each of the three new apps works in a similar way: once installed on someone’s homescreen, it can be set up with three recipes chosen from an in-app catalogue of possible actions.

In Do Button’s case, those actions can be anything from sharing a current location, emailing a specific contact to say they’re on the way home or blocking off the next hour as “Do not disturb” in a calendar through to setting a Nest thermostat to a certain temperature.

Do Camera focuses on photography, with recipes including creating a photo note in Evernote, uploading a shot to a specific Facebook album and posting a whiteboard note to Slack.

Do Note, meanwhile, is a notepad app where notes can be quickly emailed, tweeted, created as calendar events, printed and various other uses. IFTTT’s theory is that the more internet services someone uses, the more recipes will be relevant within its new apps.

“They effectively allow you to make your own app, effectively hacking something together that you wanted to do, but which takes a number of steps in whatever app you’d be using to do it,” said Tibbets.

“We are currently limiting it to just three recipes, which allows us to keep the user interface really clean, so we can focus on helping people go from zero to three recipes. Although expanding that is something we think could be part of a forthcoming premium account.”

That’s how the free Do apps tie in to IFTTT’s wider business, which to this point has been free to use, and funded by several rounds of venture capital funding – most recently $30m in August 2014.

The company hopes that if power users chafe at the three-recipes limit in the Do apps, they might be prepared to pay for a premium account that might also add more features to the parent IF service.

“The audience for this is going to be a wider audience than the folks who are currently using IFTTT,” said Tibbets. That said, IFTTT’s challenge will be explaining what Do is and how it works effectively enough to persuade those mainstream users to download it in the first place.

Examples of recipes within Do Button and Do Camera.

Those that do will find that IFTTT is onto something with its “programmable button” concept, though. Some of its uses are novelties, but many are genuine time-savers.

For example, I email myself notes and links between 15 and 20 times a day – each time opening up my email app, typing the first few letters of my address, typing a subject, pasting in the body copy then tapping ‘send’.

That’s where something like Do Note comes in, complete with the ability to work as a widget (including on iOS) to save small, but noticeable time on that particular task.

It’s that relatively rare thing: an app that aims to get you spending less time using apps and more time engaging with the people and world around you. Mention of which sparked a conversation about Tibbets’ and IFTTT’s grander ambitions.

“So many people are starting to hypothesise about what comes after apps. People tried to shoehorn the web into the mobile phone, that didn’t work, and that was one reason apps were able to live and thrive as the alternative,” he said.

“We think a similar shift as we look at other modes of interaction. For virtual reality, Google Glass, Apple Watch and other wearables, the app metaphor doesn’t quite work.

“Do is a step in this really interesting direction: they’re still apps, or at least they start as apps. But they allow you to think of them as functions: it’s a button, and you can connect that button to any of the other services that might be apps.”

Mention of wearables provokes the obvious question about whether Do might not be as useful on a smartwatch – whether Apple’s or one of the growing number running Android Wear – as it is on a smartphone.

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“We think it’s an amazing fit for a watch. It’s something we’re certainly taking a look at. As a concept, this can really be a whole lot of things outside of being a set of apps. It could be a browser extension, a physical button next to your light-switch, or something in your car,” said Tibbets.

“As a concept, a button that you can program to do exactly what you want it to do has legs beyond just being a set of apps.”

Back to those ambitions. Tibbets talked about Do in terms of a “foundational layer for a future operating system”, before quickly stressing that IFTTT isn’t (yet) trying to go head to head with Google and Apple in building its own OS.

“We think operating systems will begin to detach from the phone, and in fact they’ll no longer be so tightly coupled with any one device. Phones, TVs, cars will begin to operate across a service layer. You’ll have your phone in your pocket a lot more, but you’ll still be interacting with services in a physical environment,” he said.

“We’re at the very early stages of exploring what these modes of interaction are. What does this future OS look like? The movie Her is a good example of what’s possible if you have this common services layer where you’re able to get the answers to things like ‘did I get an email from my boss? Was he upset? If so, respond with this…’

“Or ‘lock this door, but make sure you unlock it when my mom comes over to feed the cat. If we ever have a system that’s going to do those things, this service layer has to exist. That’s the platform we’re trying to build.”