Connecting your apps

Apps are the accounts you already use. Connecting one lets Else work inside it instead of handing you instructions to go and do it yourself. The Apps screen states the deal in one line: “Let your assistant work inside the apps you already use. Connect one, then choose exactly what it’s allowed to do — every action shows up on your receipt.”

The two halves of that sentence are the whole page. It can act inside your accounts, and it cannot do so quietly.

The six first-class apps

Six are wired in directly, and the run panel names what each one is for:

App	What it does
Gmail	Read, draft and send with approval
Google Drive	Find files and save deliverables
Notion	Search notes and create pages
Slack	Read threads and publish updates
GitHub	Read repositories and open pull requests
Airtable	Read and update connected records

Beyond those six, the Apps screen carries a large A–Z directory of other services, grouped by category — Data, Productivity, Developer Tools, Marketing, Communication and so on. Anything in there connects the same way.

Connecting is not permanent. An app you connected can be disconnected again from the same screen — and disconnecting is the only per-app control there is. A connected app’s panel offers Disconnect and nothing else: there is no list of individual actions to switch on and off. Where you choose what it may do is per run, not per app, and the section below is that mechanism.

Connecting it does not put it into a run

This is the step people miss, so it is here rather than three pages away. A connected app is not automatically available to your work. Built-in Add-ons are all on by default; apps are not. You add an app to a run yourself, from the This run panel above the composer.

And do that from inside a chat, not from the home screen. The home composer does not read your connections at all — every app in its list reads Connect in Apps whether you have connected it or not, and tapping one takes you to the Apps screen instead of adding it to the run. Send your opening message first, then set the apps up in the chat.

Using an app you connected is the page on all of that.

Two ways to connect, and your credentials

Some apps connect by signing in. Most connect by pasting a key: you open the app in the directory, and Else asks for exactly the field that app needs, with the instructions for finding it — for one service, *“API key used with HTTP Basic authentication. Create or view app API keys in the … dashboard under App settings

API keys.“* Then Connect securely. A few apps need no credential at all and connect with one click.

If an app is one Else cannot offer sign-in for, it says so rather than failing obscurely: “This app isn’t open for sign-in yet.” In that case, use a key.

Under the form is the promise that matters:

Your details are encrypted and never shown to the AI.

Read that as written. The key you paste is stored encrypted, and it is not part of what the model sees. Else uses it to make the call; the assistant working on your task does not get handed your credential to reason about, quote, or accidentally repeat back to you.

Credentials are also checked, not just stored. If the value doesn’t work, you find out at the moment you paste it — “We couldn’t verify that credential. Double-check the value and try again.” — instead of three days later inside a failed run.

What stops for your approval

This is the part to read before you connect anything that can send.

Connecting an app is not blanket permission to use it. By default, Else checks with you before anything leaves the app at all — sending, publishing, buying or changing things. You can loosen that per run, and there is still a floor underneath you:

• Sending or publishing is a hard stop. Even on “Don’t check with me,” sending an email is held for your approval. That one is not a preference. Gmail’s own description says it: “Read and draft emails. Sending always asks you first.”
• An app action we have not explicitly cleared. Only read-shaped actions — searching, listing, fetching — proceed without asking. Anything else stops. Note that this is decided per action by us, not configured by you: there is no per-action permission list on the Apps screen to tick. What you control is which apps a run may touch at all, and which of the three settings above it runs under.
• Anything malformed or unrecognised asks. The default when Else can’t tell what an action would do is to stop, not to try it. An unknown action asks rather than guesses.

So the honest summary of what connecting buys you: it can read widely inside a connected app on its own, and it proposes rather than performs the things that would be visible to other people. Publishing a Slack update, opening a pull request, sending mail — those arrive as a decision for you, not as a fait accompli.

Where the record is

Anything Else does in a connected app happens inside a run, and a run that spent anything carries a receipt of what it was charged — so app work is never off the books. The run itself is also where you see it: the steps it worked through, and what it says it did. Check the result against that rather than against its summary — see Reviewing what comes back.

And when it does stop, the work sits parked: nothing runs and nothing is charged while it waits for your answer. Leaving an approval overnight costs you nothing. When it checks with you covers the controls in full.