Introduction

Free Mobile is the first french mobile provider to offer a service to text yourself. It’s not a complete API, but a specific endpoint that you can easily call from anywhere, to notify yourself via SMS.

It can be used in many use-cases; for instance to send a SMS when your connected home has detected an event, to tell you when your NAS has finished downloading a file, to send status notifications from your home firewall. It can also be used in Make to send you a SMS when a module fails, when a scenario starts or finishes, when a specific data has been processed, etc.

This great service is a good starting point to learn how to build a new Custom App in Make. It can then be used anywhere in your scenarios.

With Make, when there is no specific native App and you want to call a service, you have two options:

• Use the HTTP App: it allows you to call any HTTP(S) endpoint. It’s very useful when you need to make a specific call in a scenario. But it requires more technical knowledge for the one that wants to use it; it also requires understanding how the third-party API you want to use works. Moreover, if you want to call the same service from multiple scenarios, it will require you to redo the same configuration or to copy/paste.
• Create a new Custom App: A Custom app appears like any other apps in the scenario designer. It still requires more technical knowledge to build it, as well as understanding the third-party API, but the difference is that you do it once, and then any user (in your Organization or elsewhere - we’ll mention this at the end of this document) can leverage it in their scenarios without having to understand what happens under the hood.

This tutorial explains how to create the Custom App for Free Mobile / Send a SMS. It’s a step-by-step tutorial.

<aside> 💡 If you want to use the Free Mobile Custom App without having to build it, we share a link at the end of this document, so that you can install the running version of it in your Organization (it won’t give you the source, just the runtime).

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If you have the luck to be in France and to be a customer of Free Mobile, you can have it working right-away. If not, we hope this will at least help you understand the basics of Make Custom Apps.

Obviously, you can build much more advanced Custom Apps, with dynamic fields, advanced data mapping, pagination, etc. This tutorial is here to help you get started.

Implementation

Let’s start building the Custom App. Follow the steps below to create and deploy the App. Step 2 is optional; it helps understand how the Free Mobile service works.

Step 1: get the User and Password (API Key) from Free Mobile

• Go to the customer interface of Mobile Free and go to “Mes Options”

In the website of Free, there is now the option to enable SMS notifications. You can go to “Mes options” and enable “Notifications par SMS”; it will generate a new “Clé API” that you will copy somewhere for the next steps.

<aside> 💡 Link to the “Options” page of Free Mobile: Options Free Mobile

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