The next level of automations though is combining different automations and automation tools together to create automation systems. This is what an automation signal is used for.

A good example is suppose you have two apps you want to easily automate together but they don't appear together in online automation services such as IFTTT and Zapier.

But each appear in the other or maybe the one you want as a trigger doesn't quite have the type of trigger you want.

In this case you want to combine IFTTT and Zapier into one automation.

This is where automation signalling comes in.

An automation signal is different from the trigger and action concepts in that it is conceptually both an action and a trigger at the same time. It's function is to act as a gobetween for separate automation components.

With the example above an automation signal could be adding a new text file to Dropbox or adding a new line in a Google Sheet. Relatively speaking these things are quite common and simple tasks and more likely to not only be possible with different automation tools but available in the form of both actions and triggers.

With a new text file in a Dropbox folder for example, if you set that as an action in IFTTT tied to a trigger, maybe via a physical weather device that isn't listed in Zapier, then you could use Zapier to watch for new files in that specific folder in Dropbox as the trigger to then action an app not available in IFTTT, such as send weather related emails out to an email list using email service, or do something more complex than IFTTT is capable of.

Now you have best of both worlds with IFTTT and Zapier working together without any complex programming.