Shortcuts is the opposite of "enough rope to hang yourself with": not enough rope to even tie a knot.
This is an exaggeration, though. I managed to use Shortcuts even while writing this text, so it definitely is useful.
But why is Apple so goddamn afraid that if I get to do what I want, something terrible will happen? Why can't my shortcut paste, keystroke, or use SMS as triggers? I understand there could be unintended consequences, but to me at least, the limitations of Shortcuts as it is now are obviously not technical but philosophical/political from Apple. Give me keystroke shortcuts and proper triggers! I promise I won't abuse it, and I also promise to not run with scissors!
More than anything it makes me wonder who the hell it is for. My personal devices are the full Apple loadout and it's still hard to make anything meaningful with it, too confusing for the average user, not powerful enough for the power user.
It could become interesting if there were some integrations with Apple Intelligence: the tasks you'd delegate to a shortcut are the kind of low-stakes stuff AI integration is a good fit for. It doesn't look like it's in the cards, though...
I use it daily to turn my iOS device to low power when I use a photo and video app - this little trick turns off HDR that I profoundly detest and can't visually stand for.
I’ve built a lot of small little things with shortcuts, but the only thing I still use is one I made to change my background/lock screen to a random photo from an album. I set it to run every morning so I wake up to a new photo. I shared the album with my partner too so they can add photos to the rotation. It’s small but I love it!
I also made a shortcut that lives on my home screen to open a notes page for today, creating a new one if it doesn’t exist already. That one would be more used if I could ever get a journaling habit to stick.
It’s certainly very limited and suffers a lot from a poor interface, but I don’t think people give it enough credit.
It is for me. Apparently you can’t turn on Wifi Hotspot on a single tap on iOS, or switch off Bluetooth or Wifi completely on iOS so a few shortcuts to do these in control center it is.
Perhaps the reasoning is not that you will abuse it. But could other people abuse it and use it against you.
If you try to paste anything into the dev tools in Chrome, it forces you to specifically allow pasting because scammers have convinced people to do it over the phone to con them into something. How I’m not quite sure.
Security concerns are one thing that hold Shortcuts back, but a lot of the stuff just doesn't work. It's pretty half assed. For example, sending messages is broken and according to forum posts has been for a few years.
It's pretty obvious that automation for non-developers is not a priority at Apple.
You shouldn't have to make any promises to a corporation about what you will and won't do with a device that you purchase from them, including what software you wish to run.
True in principle. Looking at it from Apple’s side, they are selling an ecosystem of clients to digital (or physical) service providers with certain guarantees on how that ecosystem operates.
Opening up automation is a double whammy for Apple:
- More savvy users are able to solve more of their problems themselves, reducing the LTV of their potentially most engaged clients who might buy less on the App Store as a result
- Some guarantees of the ecosystem crumble (banking apps don’t know anymore if it is really you who initiated that transaction, ID verification apps don’t know if that camera stream is really from your device, and plenty other things devs suddenly have to worry about)
As a final nail in the coffin, it also means that the networks that Apple sells to its _users_ are less reliable or have less guarantees as a result - you don’t know if the text you received was really sent now or scheduled in advance etc.
Of course a lot of these rules are not justified, user hostile or plain non-sensical, but what I’m trying to say is that from Apple’s perspective the consideration is not just “user owns device” but a lot of interplaying dynamics that do not seem to be in favor of empowering users.
The problem is not you, nor anyone tech savvy enough to comment on hacker news, but the masses who can barely paw their way through their smartphone screen. It will be abused and cause problems, and Apple knows that.
>But why is Apple so goddamn afraid that if I get to do what I want, something terrible will happen?
I feel like this is the general business ethos of modern consumer-facing tech. They don't want to sell tools that serve you. They want to sell a service to chew your food for you as you accept whatever mush they feed you.
The hotspot settings are particularly barren. You can turn the hotspot on/off, change the password... and... that's it. They can't be used for anything useful, like detecting when a device connects/disconnects. I'm not sure why they added Shortcuts in this state.
Well, yeah. It’s borderline usable in iOS, and almost pointless in macOS because we still have Automator and much more useful AppleScript integrations—which are being eroded by time and little maintenance from Apple.
Then there’s JavaScript for Automation, PyObjC, and many other technologies that Apple never really invested in because they just don’t get automation.
Somehow, Shortcuts survived being acquired, but in the process they actually killed stupefyingly useful functionality like being able to run some automations directly from the Apple Watch (I used it to send automated SMS messages to query bus schedules based on my location, and it was awesome).
Sal Soghoian, the man who headed up user automation tools at Apple – including AppleScript and Automator – says that he left the company last month when Apple eliminated his position ‘for business reasons.’ … The decision to lose Soghoian after almost 20 years in the role, together with a statement that makes the future of user automation tools seem uncertain, is bound to cause concern among those of us who depend on them on a daily basis. The fear will be that Apple may gradually cease support for power tools as part of an increasing consumer focus.
In the next year or two, Apple is rumored to be entering the smart-home automation market with:
- wall mounted 6" screen + voice control
- iPad on robotic arm
- FaceID door locks
- security cameras
Shortcuts is buggy and difficult to work with, but it is the escape hatch on apple watch that makes the watch usable without also carrying your phone everywhere.
I have a shortcut for captive portals when you want to get on WiFi, a shortcut to dictate a quick search on Kagi (I am working on another for Kagi Assistant) and another to check the trains on the train website. Between these and apple wallet I can leave my phone at home.
I’m more positive about shortcuts and looking for ways to integrate it with my home automation.
I think it’s pretty cool that I can make a shortcut connect to a host on my home network via ssh and execute a command. To just trigger that using my voice and Siri when my phone is nearby.
I live in a country with stupidly expensive electricity, so have my home media center connected to a smart switch, which I switch off last thing at night. I am thinking of moving my Pi mini NAS setup with it’s various drives into that media center setup, so last thing at night I can get a shortcut to SSH to that host, do a clean shutdown, wait a short while, and then use the Hue connector in Shortcuts to cut the power. I couldn’t do all that with either Amazon Echo or the Hue app.
The saddest part is that both the Alexa and Apple walled gardens spent years constraining users from integrating with other ecosystems, but now they are all racing to give data to 3rd-party LLMs like OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini, which can ... integrate with other ecosystems via APIs, MCP servers.
Users can now escape walled gardens, at the cost of multiple middlemen. If Alexa and Apple had allowed users to access other ecosystems, there would now be thriving customer communities with proven open workflows that could be sherlocked into commercial success by the platform owners. Instead, that value will accrue to foundation model companies.
> The saddest part is that both the Alexa and Apple walled gardens spent years constraining users from integrating with other ecosystems, but now they are all racing to give data to 3rd-party LLMs like OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini, which can ... integrate with other ecosystems via APIs, MCP servers.
That reminds me of an announcement maybe about a year(?) ago, when people on the internet were making a huge deal out of ChatGPT integrating with Wolfram Alpha like it was this game changer, and I just remember thinking... we already had this with Siri over a decade ago, with no LLM middleman necessary, until Apple decided to kill it and start integrating their "machine learning" into all their products around mid 2010s.
All I want is an automation to turn my hotspot on when I get in my car. You can do this, it’s easy. What’s not easy is being able to rely on it. It fails with a notification about half the time. Which is another thing, can I please have a setting to surprise the automation run notification? I know it’s there for safety but if it’s an explicit option… just let me do what I want to do Dangit.
Despite being a "power user" of macOS (and having had been for close to 25 years now), I only tried Shortcuts for the first time last week, to try to automate opening any of the live TV streaming apps (YouTube TV, Fubo etc) to a specified channel in one button click. Unfortunately none of the TV apps on the platform have bothered to expose such basic functionality, so I ended up cancelling my subscription to each one I tried.
If anyone knows of an app that gives access to live TV and actually cares about the basic functionality of the platform they run on, I'd love to hear about it and they can have my money.
Shortcut is one of the main selling point for an iphone vs an Android. There is just nothing comparable.
Yet even then, I know I have particular need, I'm not the average apple customer. Most people never heard about shortcut and wouldn't care if it disappeared.
Working on shortcut must be quite time consuming and benefit something like 1% of apple customer, so I get that it's never really going to be a priority.
They would rather focus on artificial intelligence that the average Joe can use.
Isn't Tasker[0] the Android equivalent? I have never used an iPhone though, so I can't comment on the differences. I also haven't used Tasker in about 5 years, so I'm not sure if it's gotten more or less powerful over time.
Also, a quick search shows Automation[1] as an open source alternative. No personal experience with this one, but will probably try it out soon.
Yep - I switched from iPhone to Android and Tasker is much more powerful. Slightly less good UX and mainly systems focussed. But actually allows any trigger.
Also extensible - it can trigger scripts in Termux. You can install any command line open source tool inside Termux and trigger it on tasks.
eg When my home radiator thermostat stopped supporting IFTTT, I made a Python script to call their API and trigger it with Tasker. Works flawlessly.
It's equivalent on the surface, but it's vastly more complicated to use and has many more failure modes due to different phone models, root vs non-root actions, and more. It's definitely a power user tool, whereas non-technical users can create shortcuts with Shortcuts much more easily.
I experimented with the idea of going back to Android. Having to recreate all of my shortcuts in Tasker was one non-starter. (It not having a HomeKit equivalent was the other. Google Home is much more limited.)
Shortcuts can also sync between Apple devices via iCloud (though Automations in Shortcuts don't; another thing that drives me mad about the app), and they more-or-less work regardless of where they're running.
I've used Tasker for a while, and it does absolutely everything that can be done on an Android phone, you can even make UIs with it.
I had an iPhone for a few months recently, and I tried the Shortcuts app, but it was extremely limited and couldn't even do some simple things I needed.
What kind of uses do you have for it that make it this indispensable? Not doubting, just feeling like I'm missing out because I don't think I've ever used it.
You're joking, right? First off, a lot of things that you have to automate on an iPhone is just native UI in Android. For example, add a shortcut to a picture on your home screen. It's native in Android. Just long tap the file in the Files app and Add to Home.
Then there is the Modes and Routines app that allows you to do anything.
On iPhone, to add a shortcut to a picture, the Shortcut app asks me to give it the filename! Of course they hide the filename everywhere they can because apple. They could provide a browse like experience but no, type in the filename! How am I supposed to find the filename if you hide it from me?
You're right. Because the automation apps on Android actually work, and Shortcuts can most charitably be described as a hot mess that should be put out to pasture.
Readit News
This is an exaggeration, though. I managed to use Shortcuts even while writing this text, so it definitely is useful.
But why is Apple so goddamn afraid that if I get to do what I want, something terrible will happen? Why can't my shortcut paste, keystroke, or use SMS as triggers? I understand there could be unintended consequences, but to me at least, the limitations of Shortcuts as it is now are obviously not technical but philosophical/political from Apple. Give me keystroke shortcuts and proper triggers! I promise I won't abuse it, and I also promise to not run with scissors!
It could become interesting if there were some integrations with Apple Intelligence: the tasks you'd delegate to a shortcut are the kind of low-stakes stuff AI integration is a good fit for. It doesn't look like it's in the cards, though...
I also made a shortcut that lives on my home screen to open a notes page for today, creating a new one if it doesn’t exist already. That one would be more used if I could ever get a journaling habit to stick.
It’s certainly very limited and suffers a lot from a poor interface, but I don’t think people give it enough credit.
If you try to paste anything into the dev tools in Chrome, it forces you to specifically allow pasting because scammers have convinced people to do it over the phone to con them into something. How I’m not quite sure.
It's pretty obvious that automation for non-developers is not a priority at Apple.
Opening up automation is a double whammy for Apple:
- More savvy users are able to solve more of their problems themselves, reducing the LTV of their potentially most engaged clients who might buy less on the App Store as a result
- Some guarantees of the ecosystem crumble (banking apps don’t know anymore if it is really you who initiated that transaction, ID verification apps don’t know if that camera stream is really from your device, and plenty other things devs suddenly have to worry about)
As a final nail in the coffin, it also means that the networks that Apple sells to its _users_ are less reliable or have less guarantees as a result - you don’t know if the text you received was really sent now or scheduled in advance etc.
Of course a lot of these rules are not justified, user hostile or plain non-sensical, but what I’m trying to say is that from Apple’s perspective the consideration is not just “user owns device” but a lot of interplaying dynamics that do not seem to be in favor of empowering users.
I feel like this is the general business ethos of modern consumer-facing tech. They don't want to sell tools that serve you. They want to sell a service to chew your food for you as you accept whatever mush they feed you.
Then there’s JavaScript for Automation, PyObjC, and many other technologies that Apple never really invested in because they just don’t get automation.
Somehow, Shortcuts survived being acquired, but in the process they actually killed stupefyingly useful functionality like being able to run some automations directly from the Apple Watch (I used it to send automated SMS messages to query bus schedules based on my location, and it was awesome).
Someone put a lot of effort into designing that system. Then it was basically forgotten.
Then it was resurrected in partially zombified form as Shortcuts - and forgotten again.
https://9to5mac.com/2016/11/17/mac-user-automation-sal-sogho...
In the next year or two, Apple is rumored to be entering the smart-home automation market with: Is HomeAssistant popular on Apple platforms?Also, I have been noticing more AI-generated slop comments on this discussion board.
I have a shortcut for captive portals when you want to get on WiFi, a shortcut to dictate a quick search on Kagi (I am working on another for Kagi Assistant) and another to check the trains on the train website. Between these and apple wallet I can leave my phone at home.
I was trying to work with it to customize finder a bit and found it had so a lot of permission and settings config requirements.
Have the security changes and scrambling of System Settings made Automator harder to use?
They can run external tasks via SSH scripts or API endpoints, e.g. send audio to LLM, https://www.innoq.com/en/blog/2023/03/openai-gpt-on-macos-io...
For local actions, app-specific URL schemes can be driven from shortcuts, https://www.macstories.net/tutorials/guide-url-scheme-ios-dr...
In iOS18 on iPhone Pro with lidar, a shortcut can trigger Magnifier to provide audio description of live camera image.
NFC stickers or expired transit cards can trigger shortcuts by physical proximity.
I think it’s pretty cool that I can make a shortcut connect to a host on my home network via ssh and execute a command. To just trigger that using my voice and Siri when my phone is nearby.
I live in a country with stupidly expensive electricity, so have my home media center connected to a smart switch, which I switch off last thing at night. I am thinking of moving my Pi mini NAS setup with it’s various drives into that media center setup, so last thing at night I can get a shortcut to SSH to that host, do a clean shutdown, wait a short while, and then use the Hue connector in Shortcuts to cut the power. I couldn’t do all that with either Amazon Echo or the Hue app.
The saddest part is that both the Alexa and Apple walled gardens spent years constraining users from integrating with other ecosystems, but now they are all racing to give data to 3rd-party LLMs like OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini, which can ... integrate with other ecosystems via APIs, MCP servers.
Users can now escape walled gardens, at the cost of multiple middlemen. If Alexa and Apple had allowed users to access other ecosystems, there would now be thriving customer communities with proven open workflows that could be sherlocked into commercial success by the platform owners. Instead, that value will accrue to foundation model companies.
That reminds me of an announcement maybe about a year(?) ago, when people on the internet were making a huge deal out of ChatGPT integrating with Wolfram Alpha like it was this game changer, and I just remember thinking... we already had this with Siri over a decade ago, with no LLM middleman necessary, until Apple decided to kill it and start integrating their "machine learning" into all their products around mid 2010s.
I could probably do much of this stuff with Home Assistant, but it’s always a bit too far down the todo list. One day…
If anyone knows of an app that gives access to live TV and actually cares about the basic functionality of the platform they run on, I'd love to hear about it and they can have my money.
Yet even then, I know I have particular need, I'm not the average apple customer. Most people never heard about shortcut and wouldn't care if it disappeared.
Working on shortcut must be quite time consuming and benefit something like 1% of apple customer, so I get that it's never really going to be a priority.
They would rather focus on artificial intelligence that the average Joe can use.
Also, a quick search shows Automation[1] as an open source alternative. No personal experience with this one, but will probably try it out soon.
[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.dinglisch....
[1] https://server47.de/automation/
Also extensible - it can trigger scripts in Termux. You can install any command line open source tool inside Termux and trigger it on tasks.
eg When my home radiator thermostat stopped supporting IFTTT, I made a Python script to call their API and trigger it with Tasker. Works flawlessly.
https://www.flourish.org/2023/11/netatmo-smart-thermostat-ho...
I experimented with the idea of going back to Android. Having to recreate all of my shortcuts in Tasker was one non-starter. (It not having a HomeKit equivalent was the other. Google Home is much more limited.)
Shortcuts can also sync between Apple devices via iCloud (though Automations in Shortcuts don't; another thing that drives me mad about the app), and they more-or-less work regardless of where they're running.
I had an iPhone for a few months recently, and I tried the Shortcuts app, but it was extremely limited and couldn't even do some simple things I needed.
I couldn't figure out how to do it using tasker.
Then there is the Modes and Routines app that allows you to do anything.
On iPhone, to add a shortcut to a picture, the Shortcut app asks me to give it the filename! Of course they hide the filename everywhere they can because apple. They could provide a browse like experience but no, type in the filename! How am I supposed to find the filename if you hide it from me?
You're right. Because the automation apps on Android actually work, and Shortcuts can most charitably be described as a hot mess that should be put out to pasture.