Shortcuts actions and automations can do a lot if you know how to use them, however the GUI (Graphical User Interface) is prone to crashes for no apparent reason, occasionally does not display correct variable names or show the proper end statements. The GUI was ok in 14, terrible in 15 and has greatly improved in 16 but still needs work. If you like being frustrated occasionally and solving puzzles to achieve your goals, then this app is for you. I have spent literally days trying to figure out issues and have submitted more than a few bug reports to Apple to have some get fixed and other to still be broken after two years. As a retired IT guy I can say this is the worse programing GUI I have ever experienced, but it has improve and Apple continues to add new capabilities via new actions in each release. I have hope Apple will achieve five stars, I only wish Apple would put more effort and quality control in to it. Rating with four stars being very generous.
I have noticed a bunch of limitations to the shortcuts and automations. For instance, some automations require you to click a notification to run which defeats the purpose. I cannot simply have my device play music whenever it connects to my bluetooth headphones. Also, with the automations that do not require a button press, there will be a notification that the automation ran and while that’s annoying on its own, it also lingers for a good few seconds, blocking some buttons that reside on the top of the screen. Same for the shortcuts, although the shortcut notification doesn’t stay as long, it’s much bigger. I’ve made a shortcut which selects random pictures in any designated album and displays them. However, after I press the ‘done’ button, it doesn’t allow me to do anything for a second before the ‘shortcut has been completed’ notification has disappeared. In the app itself, I believe that adding a folder or tab which the function blocks could go under but still be activated, the point of this would be to help organization and decrease the amount of scrolling one would need to get to wherever they need. It would really help, especially in the longer shortcuts/automations. Overall, I’d like more functions and freedoms with the way the shortcuts and automations are configured and
I love the potential of this app. Customization and organization are very important to me. But the constant notification banners that pop down every time you open an app are absolutely maddening (a common complaint, from what I've seen.) I scoured forums and found a way to disable them for when I open a single app (although I really think there needs to be a simple, permanent option that doesn't require screen time and running an automation) but I still get a banner every time I select an app option from a menu. (Especially frustrating considering I'd like to pair multiple camera apps in a menu together under one icon, but the banner freezes the camera screen for a full few seconds making it impossible to snap a quick photo.) Also, it would be great if we could choose custom photos for shortcuts added to widgets like we can for shortcuts added to the home screen. Lastly, if possible, it would be lovely to have notification badges display on the shortcut icons like they do on the originals, so I can customize my mail and messages apps and still be able to see the number of new emails and texts. Thank you for taking the time to read this and (hopefully) take this into consideration for future updates!
The idea for this app is pretty good, but the numerous bugs make this almost unusable (I am on iPhone SE2020). If the bugs were fixed, I would happily update my review to 5 stars. Here are some of the bugs I’ve seen: 1) Opening a modified link from the clipboard (or shared screen) is quick at first, but over time it gets slower and slower to open until shortcuts will simply show me the banner (which tells me it’s opening the modified link) but it never does. This is sometimes fixed if I turn the phone off all the way 2) Adding and removing commands to new shortcuts is super buggy. If I want to duplicate and modify an existing shortcut, often it is easier to just make a new shortcut from scratch since the bugs slow me down a lot. For example, sometimes you cannot change the first command in a shortcut under any circumstances (I fear that this is not a “bug”, but a “feature”, example: I cannot delete the first action if it is “Receive _ from _”). 3) Newly created Share-tray shortcuts will often not show up in the share screen. I need to mess with the app a bunch to get them to show up (this might be specific to iPhone SE 2020) Also, there are missing features that really should be present (like the ability to open links in a specific tab group or private browsing in safari).
There’s a bug with the shortcut to add a song to a playlist and/or how the shortcuts app interacts with Apple Music. I’m using the shortcut from the gallery on my iPhone 13 running iOS 15.4. The shortcut initially works and adds the song to the playlist as intended, but for some reason the added song doesn’t sync (over iCloud) to to version of the same playlist on my Mac. Further, when the playlist syncs to my Mac, it wipes all songs from the same playlist on my phone that we’re added with the shortcut. However it doesn’t wipe any songs added to the same playlist that we’re added using the ‘add to playlist’ selection on songs contextual menu in Apple Music app. These added songs sync with no issues. Initially I was very happy with this shortcut until I found that all the songs I’d added to various playlists were being lost the entire time. At this point the only way I can save these songs is to constantly save these particular playlists as new playlists and then re-save the new playlist’s contents back to the original playlists. As you can imagine, this is anything but a time saver and if I miss saving an updated playlist before it syncs to my Mac, the updated songs are lost… Please Help!
This app is far more than what meets the eye at first. I don't understand why anyone would give this a 3 star rating or lower unless they just hadn't seen the extent of its features yet or weren't into programming small little scripts that basically don't require any coding knowledge at all to do. You can do so much with this app and I feel that too much of it goes way too unnoticed!! I personally enjoy using it for fun little projects like creating a mastermind game using shortcut menus and if-then scripts and stuffs, but it has a ton of practical use as well for the average person. And yeah, I understand that there are some bugs every now and then like really big shortcuts freezing up or taking awhile to run, but for what it gives in return I can overlook the little bugs and appreciate the whole far better. So in conclusion... this is a GREAT app, and should be used by and recommended to more people. Probably one of Apple's best factory default apps which deserves more love and attention.
I love using this app!!! A couple of big problems though…
I love to use this app, but I have 2 really big problems. When scrolling through shortcuts with many scripts, there is a lot of lag. I’m unsure if it’s a hardware problem or if it’s the software. Second of all, the app randomly freezes but doesn’t crash. There isn’t a black screen or visual glitches. I’m 99% sure that it has nothing to do with the display, because my device works fine and will shut off like normal. It just stays paused on the frame before it freezes and will not work unless I close it and wait several minutes before opening it again. This is a pretty annoying bug, but everything works fine otherwise! It’s pretty cool to program and use your device in unique ways using it! I will continue to use Shortcuts (as I enjoy making these types of programs) but will contact the devs of the Shortcuts app if anything else goes wrong. Welp, that’s all I gotta say! I’m gonna go finish making a jumpscare prank on here!
The more I use this app the more I learn. I’m constantly adding functions such as “Choose from menu”, “Ask”, “IF” to create combinations of task. I also love that I can create Shortcuts for one action functions, and use Apple Schemes to navigate to directories. Plus it has Automation functions like start my playlist when my phone connects to Bluetooth in my car. And they have a folder structure with icon selection to stay organized. I recently created a Shortcut that run an OpenAI API question and answer session. I keep adding functions to this Shortcut. Now when ran it starts by asking “What would you like to know?l” then it asked if you want to save to the Notes app. If yes it adds the question, answer, and a tag (because I added them as variables) and allows you to save it. If no it asks if you want it to stop asking to save. If yes it runs another similar Shortcut that only rotates the Q&A without asking the other options. If no it starts the same session over.
Can’t give it 5 stars. Needs to be able to store a setting in a persistent data store.
TL;DR: Store a setting in a persistent data store *without the need for a privacy prompt*. Shortcuts provides the needed miss automation that is accessible to other mobile platforms, with one glaring exception: quick, easy, persistent data storage. Certainly a piece of automation should be able to store a setting in a persistent data store *without the need for a privacy prompt*. I get it. Privacy. After Googling and working with ChatGPT, the only non-prompting option I found was to use a **Note**. As in a note in the Apple Notes app. 100% Kludge. I’ll welcome a response by anyone saying, “do it this way instead”. All I wanted was a way for one Automation to be able to prevent another automation from running, with that setting persistent, and without a user prompt. I’m writing it, so my approval should be built-in. Thanks for reading this!
I love Shortcuts, I have been using it since it was Workflow. I liked Workflow better because you really learned to program with it from the ground up. Apple has really dumbed down Shortcuts in these latest versions for the masses in respect to really programming shortcuts from the ground up. However, I’m deeply disappointed, I bought an Apple Watch with the sole excitement of using Shortcuts on my Apple Watch and I have never been able to use Shortcuts on the actual Watch, “THEY WILL NOT SHOW UP ON THE WATCH” or under the actual Watch App list on the iPhone. This a known issue what gives? Each update, I’m hopeful this issue will be resolved and nope the Shortcuts Apps will not show up as an option to select in the Watch App and the Apple Watch keeps saying,No shortcuts you can add them in the Shortcuts App on your iphone, which are listed and designated for the Apple Watch, but don’t show up. There is a disconnect between the iPhone Shortcut App and the Watch App not letting the Shortcut App appear as a selection to be on the watch and the actual Apple Watch Shortcuts App. Just works- nah, It just doesn’t, please fix it Apple.
Siri Shortcuts is extremely powerful especially when you delve into tools like regex and api calls. My ADD makes it difficult to stay focused and complete tedious computer tasks at work (i.e. file management) but I’ve been able to make helper scripts for myself that take care of things like batch renaming files, organizing folders, backing up files, etc. It’s been a life saver for my work. One feature request on my wish list is the ability to pull either an AAE file or JSON file for all the edits made to a image in Apple’s Photo library. Primarily I’m interested in grabbing the cropping, straightening, and leveling edits made in Photos so I can programmatically apply it to other photos or export the specs of the edit for use in other photo editing programs. Big thank you for the continued development of this app, it has helped me so much in my in my personal and professional tasks.
The idea of this app has always seemed potentially awesome, but then I open the app and there is just no where to begin. I want to create a shortcut to something, but there is no option to create a shortcut. The Shortcuts app, whose entire purpose is to create shortcuts, has no option to create a shortcut. It's like it starts in the middle instead of at the beginning, giving you options, but options for what? You haven't even created anything yet... And the most obvious potential of this app is to create literal shortcuts, to say a music playlist, so you don't have to open the music app, go to playlists, scroll through the playlists, find your playlist, and finally play it. You could just have a shortcut directly on your home screen. Or the millions of version of this experience, a long news article you've been slowly reading your way through, the new AppleTV show you just discovered, a specific document you're working on. To cut through all the navigation and waiting for each page of each step to load, you just cut straight to it, you take a shortcut.
I really want to use automations more, like toggling wifi and cellular when i arrive/leave home or a friend’s house etc. but for some reason there’s no toggle to ask before running for all types of automation triggers. it’s there for some, like when you stop an alarm, but it’s not there for others, like arriving at/leaving a location. Also, why is there no option to trigger silent mode on the ipad or apple watch through a shortcut? that should be integrated into focus but since it isn’t i’d like to use shortcuts as a workaround. since it’s not connected to a hardware switch on those devices, you should be able to toggle that through shortcuts. like i said, almost amazing. automations are incredibly useful and i use shortcuts every single day, but there are a few key things missing. those two just bother me the most
I really like using this app and you can make it do some pretty neat stuff. It has an ask before running in most cases, but I noticed for receiving an iMessage message you have to tap the notification which makes this automation practically useless. Why would I make an “automation” if it’s not actually automatic when I have to tap twice to get it to do what I want to do. I frequently lose my phone around and wanted it to turn the volume up and play a song when my wife would send me a certain message. It would be easier than having her log into my account or me log into a computer to make it beep on Find my iPhone. So maybe let us be able to choose if we want it to run automatically and integrate Find My iPhone in Shortcuts. If the “ask to run” isn’t there because of “security”, enough with all this “security” stuff and let us choose how we want to run our phone and how secure it is. Thanks!
Using shortcuts you can automatically open URLs! Go to shortcuts app and click the plus in the top right. Then, click “All Options” and scroll all the way down and look for “Open URLs” After that click on that option and select a URL and you can open that URL just by going to the app. Additionally, you can add that shortcut, to open a URL, to your home screen! There are a lot more functions with shortcuts so look around. There’s an option to power off your phone and you can set that based off time. Also, you can turn do not disturb on or off based on time, alarm, and even other shortcuts. Shortcuts is really versatile and I’m pretty sure that, if you’re smart and try hard enough, you can even change your brightness automatically based off just time.
I would deeply appreciate the ability for shortcuts to 1: access mp3 files without having to fool with the base 64 encode function and 2: display whichever mp3 file is currently playing. A simple “display” box that allows you to display input that does not block the functionality of the rest of the screen would be useful, at least to me. For example, if I wanted a shortcut that would play an mp3 file and then leave the play/pause button that accompanies the file at the top of the screen, so that I could use other apps and whatnot and pause the file when I wanted to, there should be a box titled “display” that I could add to the shortcut. There would have to be an input slot where you can choose the input, in my case the currently playing file. I know what I’m asking for is very specific, but I think it would be a game-changer, not just for myself, but for a whole lot of people.
I downloaded the Shortcuts app for the Camera shutter sound. For some reason Apple decided to remove the option of removing the ability to turn it off in Settings so I YouTube’d how to turn it off. Using the Shortcut app I no longer have the shutter sound, but now EVERY TIME I open my camera Shortcuts sends me a notification letting me know that this Shortcut exists. Now no problem if I keep the camera on all the the time, but this is an iPhone & for some reason the Camera drains the battery very quickly, so that’s not an option. I’d remove the notification option in Settings, but that’s not an option either. Why remove one sound just to have another unremovable sound in return?
It used to work pretty simple. I just hit my favorite “remove the background” from a pic and you get a choice to copy and you could the go to another app that allows you to paste and then you have pic minus the background that can be added. You have screwed up the whole process to where I can’t even go into my pic albums and select what pic I want. The menus look like you let a 6th grade student have a ball with making a simple project very complicated and unusable. You just made a simple process so complicated that it is unusable. I have spent a couple of days with the shortcut to remove the background from a pic and to allow the pic to then be pasted wherever I want and there is no way that I can find to do that. In spite of the publicity about Taylor’s pics, all I wanted to do was to put my grandkids in my boat that had been restored in 2016. But it seems I can’t do that anymore. A month or so ago this worked great. What has happened???
Keep your head high and stay focused on what you can do for yourself
The new law would require the federal government of Canada and other countries passed a new anti corruption law that allows for an investigation into alleged wrongdoing and the possibility for criminal prosecution against those involved by a foreign country and a member of an overseas group known to have ties in the country ……but not by the same foreign governments who have already committed crimes against Americans citizens or their families abroad and are seeking asylum abroad for those who have committed them abroad illegally and have not received asylum at home since their arrival from other countries that have already come to Canada and are not currently living abroad or are currently being forced out of Europe to face persecution abroad
Many apps that I’ve tried linking with shortcuts in order to do check-ins and such, do not work at all, resorting to me having to go into the app itself anyways. The automation that uses location such as when “arriving” to or “leaving” a location doesn’t work properly if the highest location accessibility allowed is only when the app is in use because that would require having the app opened which the defeats the purpose of it being an automated command. However, the biggest issue with the app is it’s inability to have multiple criteria that can be easily set in order for an action to be performed. Taking the location example above, what if I wanted to add a time criteria so that it’s only when leaving and arriving on specific days and times? Can’t do that. At least not easily.
This is supposed to Apple’s response to enthusiasts’ demand for more customization. But it is a really hard scripting language to write. For instance, getting some data in a variable is require you to add a block then drop the block in the right place. You can’t remove the block for getting input from the user after adding it. Then a lot of things you simply can’t do. For example, you can set the cellular data state, but you cannot get the state. Same with WiFi. So after doing a toggle, you can’t display a prompt to say “ data set to active”. You can’t toggle location. You can’t get whether “reduce white points” was enabled. So many limitations. I have some simple advice: if you can set something, you should be able to get it. If you can navigate to the settings to change, you should be able to toggle it in shortcuts.
An Incredibly Powerful and User-Friendly Shortcut App
I'm absolutely thrilled with the Shortcuts app! It's simply fantastic! This app is not only user-friendly but also incredibly powerful, catering to all my daily work and life needs. Whether it's automating routine tasks or dealing with tedious operations, Shortcuts app has become my trusted companion. I particularly love the extensive library of pre-built actions it offers and the flexibility to customize them to my liking. These features allow me to create personalized workflows, saving me a significant amount of time and effort. Whether it's a simple task or a complex series of actions, the Shortcuts app handles it with ease. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to boost their productivity!
With the introduction of more customizable layout of iPhones I have used it frequently, one small problem, when you make a custom shortcut to customize a app icon, when you open it you get a annoying pop up at the top of the screen, and there is almost no way to get rid of it, other than also programming another action with opening the app, such as telling your calculator to type a random number, but even this method of getting rid of the pop up does not work all the time, I say about 75%, it would really be convenient if we could have the option to turn it off, I don’t need to know what app I opened, I’m opening it for a reason
This app has gotten worse and worse in the past couple of iOS updates. Mainly where I have noticed it is when trying to move things around, it crashes. There’s also long standing bugs with using shortcuts to create playlist for you. I’ve had to use what I’d assume is a work around to just add music to a playlist, finally got that working. But, if you add a bunch of songs to a playlist it’ll update. But you can’t touch the playlist at all, so you can’t remove anything or add any anything yourself to the playlist, otherwise everything else gets removed. Even if you modify a different playlist sometimes it’ll remove all the songs that were automatically added to the other playlist. It’s extremely frustrating and the app needs to be fixed as well as all the bugs that have been introduced over the last like 5 or 6 updates.
This is a really good app and it helps me feel better with sticking things to certain colors instead of regular apps that are bright and give me headaches, however i recently updated my phone and whenever i add something to the home screen it closes the app for me, it would be best if there was a settings on the app to fix that if possible! Along with the notification saying it opened the app can also get annoying, Honestly i feel like it would be best to set up a settings where you can turn these things on/off. And if there already is please tell me! ^^
I want to like this app. It has so much potential, but it’s very limited and it’s not always obvious which actions/triggers are limited. As is pointed out other places: a bunch of actions are limited to pop-up prompts. It’s not always obvious which are limited, which makes it hard to test automations. Some triggers are also limited. I wanted to trigger an action by sending myself and email. Unfortunately, only the native iOS email app works(didn’t Microsoft get in trouble for this kind of thing?). Undeterred, I started using the native Mail app. However, the trigger only happens when I open the app, which honestly defeats the whole purpose. Long and short, the app is called “Shortcuts,” which it does fine. If you want to create a shortcut it’s probably fine. Automation: this is a poor tool.
2024-Jul-15: With every new software update, the quality of the apps are steadily decreasing. eg. Shortcuts via Siri voice commands used to action without delay but now a simple task to make a FaceTime Audio call to a contact that has only ONE phone number brings up a Prompt Screen asking to confirm if user indeed wants to call the only number stored under this contact name. Is technology truly advancing with such obvious declining intelligence?! What’s the point of setting up shortcuts to perform some common tasks, such as making calls if the process requires more time and excessive follow up actions? Beats the purpose of using voice, might as well revert back to traditional Nokia era and manually press some buttons for quicker results!! 2 stars bc I love this app but no more for poor integration between the app & phone.
Edit: whelp after 30 minutes of googling and fiddling, nevermind, it can definitely do the stuff I thought it couldn’t. It’s still annoying it won’t push the send button for you, but this app can definitely grunt out some cool stuff if you take the time to figure it out. What would be awesome is if you could create a list of contacts that a shortcut could send an individual text message to. That would be great, but way beyond this app. It would also be great if this app could schedule send texts for you, but nope, it also can’t do that. It can’t do what I’d like it to.
I wanted to make a shortcut to open google chrome to the NOAA weather radar page already loaded with my location and preferred settings. Mission accomplished. However I am forced to use a large widget for the shortcut, I like my Home Screen to be clean and would like the option to put my shortcut widget in the utilities group, large widgets do not fit. Also, I found the menu to change my shortcut’s icon and did so to the “rainy cloud”. However my rainy cloud doesn’t show on the Home Screen, it only shows when I look it up in shortcuts, the Home Screen still shows a google symbol. At least I was able to edit the text for the shortcut. Anyway, shortcuts worked but is not customizable enough for my preferences.
I want to create a shortcut that would detect the first name scam and the last name likely which is how T-Mobile identifies bogus phone calls. I want the action to block that phone number so that I don’t have to manually tap five different buttons to accomplish the blocking of the Kaller phone number and deleting the phone call from my list of recent phone calls. It is absurd that the only action that exists for the phone application is make a call. I don’t need a shortcut to make a call because all I have to do to make a call is tap somebody’s phone number so if Apple wants the Shortcuts app to have a practical value in real life the list of potential actions should be more extensive to include the things that are typically done with phones. After all the iPhone has its purpose as a telephone to be the very first thing one would do with the phone
I love this app I been using it for a long time but the new update is confusing if I could rate this 5.0 billion I would. second the app bubbles colors aren’t bad people are just taking to be talking having bugs etc other problems are completely normally but taking down other the app is childish it’s just a bug - if you have any problems email them thank so much for making this app I appreciate that this app is here I absolutely love this app but the update is kinda hard 💋.second here’s another tip if u see this get an life instead of trying to bad rate anyways trintyphotos on instagram 💋💋
Trying to handoff playback from Apple TV to my phone. If this isn’t possible then why is it an option when making Shortcuts? It doesn’t do anything. It just gives me a checkmark like it did something, but nothing actually happens. And there isn’t an error message or any indication as to why. This is only one example that I tried just now. There are many others. I don’t understand why this stuff is so confusing and janky after all these years. The whole Shortcuts/Siri system is a joke, and you guys should be embarrassed to put this out as a finished product. If you aren’t going to make it better, then the least you guys can do is open up the system to allow Alexa and Google Assistant to actually work properly.
When I first looked into the app, I realized how awesome the app can be. You can automize just about anything, simple or complicated, on your phone. From a programming standpoint, the shortcuts app is its own programming language. However, after using the app for a while, I began to notice it would fail at this task often. About half the time I would run a shortcut, it would return an error. I found this particularly often with shortcuts that invoked the weather app, but I haven’t used many of the shortcut functions, so I’m use it happens elsewhere. Additionally, the automations I use on the app fail to run about half the time they should, making the app really more work than it’s worth.
I’m an avid Shortcut’s user with ~300 shortcuts and have been looking forward to the new actions/features in iOS 17 but have been disappointed by the number of features from Email, Notes and other apps that have been broke or lost. Shortcuts app no longer offers Grid View versus List View, did away with All My Shortcuts view and to date I have found 8 bugs in different actions in a matter of a few months, normally I find a few in a whole year. Why do I give 3 stars, because I remember what Shortcuts was like in it’s early years, almost useless, but prior to 17 it been almost like a full blown programming language. The release of iOS17 has become a very sad event for Shortcuts IMO.
This app is absolutely riddled with bugs on iOS 15. Things don’t go where you put them. Sometimes, elements go beyond the scroll boundaries and you can’t get to them. Filtering attendees gives events instead of attendees despite documentation to the contrary, and if you try to read the value, you’ll get a vague error message. If you run a shortcut from another shortcut, the result isn’t given anymore, which breaks a lot of shortcuts that expect output. During execution, it fails to wait for Siri to finish speaking, cutting her off with a vague error message. Pressing undo can crash the app, and does so often. In fact, this app crashes all the time. This software was not ready for the launch of iOS 15, and I feel for the team making it, as they must have been under significant time pressure.
I was excited to try this app when I realized the amount of things it can control. I’m big on automation, and love programming things like this to help me out in my normal routines. Unfortunately though, while Apple calls it ‘automation,’ their definition of automatic doesn’t quite match mine. Several of the triggers for routines, in particular location-based one, require a user confirmation before actually running. Obviously this completely defeats the purpose for me. I could just use the routines app if I wanted a location based reminder. So all in all I think this app has potential, but because of apple’s “we know better than our customers” mentality, it has some major shortcomings that keep it from being what it should be.
Aside from the recent bugs introduced in iOS 15, Shortcuts is the most well designed app that comes with your iPhone. The interface is intuitive and highly functional, and I remember that I was able to put together a time-saving shortcut within a few minutes the first time I used the app. Where the app needs improvement is the permission requests which slow down shortcut execution. I think you should be able to grant blanket permission to a trusted shortcut to do whatever it wants without being prompted to approve it. Overall, great job on this app.
Its a really good app i really love it for making my ipad cute, etc but the problem is it gets laggy at times and also i dont brother the banners but it gets annoying at times and it also sometimes freezes my screen which gets annoying at times but its almost really good and also i like using it to change my icons but it doesnt even show u that anymore! :( and its hard to find where u can change it but it also is really hard to find it i was so so simple but now its just really hard to find the button to change it so yeah kinda poor experience.
So the app works fine on my phone but it’s not working on my watch when I open the app on my ultra watch it said I have no short cut. I tried everything I unpaired the watch and nothing I called apple support they couldn’t fix it they are sending the problem to the engineers. My wife has the same setup and hers working fine. Apple needs to get there act together lots of problems with their devices for $800 dollars watch I’m accepting it to work. Now I’ll probably have to go to Apple Store to get the watch replaced. Waist of my time. Very disappointed.
When I am editing an automation and I use an app and come back to Shortcuts, I can’t push the done or cancel buttons. I have to force close Shortcuts and re-open it. It’s really annoying. Also, the notifications that say “running your automation” are really annoying. Most of the time, I don’t care if the automation is running, I just want it to do its job. I wish more automations would have the option to run by themselves. (What’s the point of being an automation if you have to do something to run it?) With some actions, like toggling alarms, I have to load it ask before running and I don’t have a choice.
I love this app, Since I got my Apple Watch SE, I’ve been making shortcuts to do cool things with it. One was a shortcuts web browser. Recently, watchOS 10.2 has a bug, Where the page in URL Is all black. But I think it loads, But it acts like the background is black, And it’s not rendering anything. Like that. Otherwise that’s the only downside. Oh also pls add a airdrop support feature, Where it opens a menu to choose who you airdrop something with. As a shortcuts script. Also specifically, The page is all black, Bur everything else is normal. Pls fix.
I have a simple workflow to capture receipts. Takes a picture and saves it to Files. Simple. But, if so tap the Home Screen between the time I select use Photo and when the Notification appears the operation will be canceled! Ridiculous! With the change in iOS to put both dialog boxes and notifications at the top of the screen it is super easy to do this especially because Shortcuts is SLOW. Even worse, there is no indication to the user that the operation was canceled simply because the Home Screen was tapped instead of waiting for the notification circle to full complete. Really bad design and experience and every Shortcuts update since Apple acquired has been getting slower and worse.
First off, I love being able to auto regulate tasks on my phone! It makes the simple things a lot easier and I enjoy not having to toggle WiFi or Bluetooth when I get home now. As for how this app can be improved: Velocity sensor that uses the phones location to sense when you’re in a car. This can be used to automatically turn on Bluetooth, play a music playlist while driving, and even change your phone to do not disturb. The ability to have automations run using all of the following in conjunction with each other: Time Range Days of the Week Location I work on a 9/80 schedule which just means that I have every other Friday off and so far I haven’t been able to figure out a way to automatically toggle my alarms to not go off when I’m not working. In addition to what I recommended above, if we had the ability to select a re-occurring cycle like: Every other day Every other week Every other month Bi-annual …that would be amazing!
Ok so first of all the whole like interface for how you choose what you want to do, is changed around, and the whole reason why I want this app is to change the pictures of the apps to be skeletons, or butterflies or even sunflowers, I can’t even access the thing to change the pictures anymore, so now if a want to change the photo it has to be an icon that the app provides so it’s now not even going to look the way I want it to look. And before I even re downloaded the app I got all of these pictures to set as my app icons, now my I cloud is clogged up with pictures I can’t even use
This is easily one of the most powerful apps on the iPhone if you know how to use it. I have been experimenting with it a lot recently and I use it almost every day in one way or another. There is still some work to be done with this app and more things to be added but it is still really useful and fun to play with as it is and I am impatient to see what they will add in future updates. I am hoping to see some sort of support for coding in the future among other things.
I will say, i dont use the app much, and when i do its great. But when I use it im looking to add some functionality to my phone and still make it pretty. So the main thing is when i’m choosing a color for the icon that will bring me to an app, theres a ver limited color pallete to choose from. So maybe add a slider of colors, or those square palettes. Another thing is to maybe add the ability to add photos to the icon, so if you want a very specific color or something to symbolize the app you can access it easier. Other then that its great 👍
I recently read an article on how this will help password protect apps that don’t offer so. I set up the automation to go to the lock screen for those apps. Need to use the fingerprint scanner to not only open the phone, but those apps as well. That’s what I wanted. However, there is one glaring oversight. The Shortcuts app isn’t on the list of apps for me to add this automation too. That is a problem and makes the lock screen automation useless if someone can just go into shortcuts and turn it off. This seems like an extremely easy fix. Please do so.
Look, I recently downloaded this app a few years ago, and when I try to change the photo on apps to make it a different theme, I have fonts also on my phone on keyboard on everything technically, and when I tried to put a little emoji like those stars ☆ I quickly found out that I couldn’t use them but before I could and I checked on the App Store if I needed to update anything there was nothing to update, so I have no idea what’s going on with it. I don’t know if it’s because of my keyboard fonts, but I feel like it’s the app itself. everything else is amazing quality.
I know how to build shortcuts perfectly fine, it’s just every time I build one, some bug stops it from working. For instance, I built a shortcut to start recording a video and start a thirty second timer, so I can record and time myself balancing my bike, but when having Siri start the shortcut, the video doesn’t start. I also built a shortcut to quickly let me search through my contacts, and then copy one to paste and send in messages. Again, works fine in the shortcuts app, but works off and on anywhere else. Opening the app and finding the shortcut really defeats the purpose of the whole thing. I wish apple would address these problems in an ios update, but nope.
Hangs and crashes repeatedly when trying to open on iPad. Has unpredictable errors when running some shortcuts (e.g. with Hue lights) even though it may have worked, maybe not. tvOS will not run your shortcuts at all because it’s a device thing, but HomePod will. Ok, but when you try to get HomePod to run it (e.g. “Goodnight”) it doesn’t work at all, but other shortcuts do. Also, it has to magically suggest shortcuts sometimes for some apps instead of allowing direct control (some apps just RELY on that, which is very bad), so you get “You just have to use it so it’ll suggest it” — then the suggested shortcut is broken and inconsistent. It’s a huge pain.
Shortcuts delivers a quicker way to get things done with just a tap or hands-free with Siri and automations. Start from hundreds of examples in the Gallery, or drag and drop to create your own unique shortcuts. Shortcuts includes over 300 built-in actions and works with Contacts, Calendar, Maps, Music, Photos, Camera, Reminders, Safari, Health and any app that supports App Intents. Use the Shortcuts app to: • Get directions home, send your ETA and start listening to the news, hands-free with Siri • Add a Home Screen icon that calls a loved one • Make animated GIFs • Make PDFs from Safari or any app with a share sheet • Get directions to the nearest coffee shop in one tap • Tweet the song you're listening to • Get all of the images on a web page • Send a message including the last screenshot you took • And so much more... Shortcuts can be launched from widgets, when searching with Spotlight, or hands-free with Siri. You can even add an app icon to your Home Screen for your favorite shortcuts. Shortcuts opens up incredible possibilities to automate things you do regularly on your iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch.