The Shortcuts app is the hub of automation on the iPhone and iPad. But even though the app has improved a lot over the past few years, there are plenty of useful features it still lacks. Hopefully Apple incorporates these changes to Shortcuts in iOS 15 and iPadOS 15.
From basic additions such as the ability to easily hide repetitive notifications to advanced features such as making it easy to run common sets of actions across multiple Shortcuts, we’ve covered the most essential features that would massively improve the Shortcuts app.
1. Notification Toggles
Want to disable repetitive notifications from Shortcuts? You can’t do this easily on your iPhone or iPad. There’s not even an option for the Shortcuts app under Settings > Notifications, which is a bit baffling.
If you’re the sort of person who has a few neat automations set up on your iPhone, iPad, or even your Apple Watch, then you’ll be getting the same annoying “Your automation is running” notification multiple times a day.
Shortcuts really needs to allow people to either disable notifications for individual automations and shortcuts or just put a toggle in the notifications section of Settings. Right now, the best way to disable those pesky notifications is via Screen Time settings, and even then, the setting gets erased every time you reboot (or update) your iPhone.
2. Support for Shortcut Updates
If you use any shortcut for social media websites (such as Instagram downloaders), you’ll know that these shortcuts tend to break often, as and when the website changes something in its APIs. This is why the ability to auto-update shortcuts, just like you can update apps, would be amazing to have.
Because Shortcuts lacks this feature, third-party websites such as RoutineHub have sprung up to maintain unofficial galleries of shortcuts. Each shortcut there has an App Store-like page where the makers can add release notes and screenshots, and just following this page will allow you to check for the latest version of the shortcut.
The official Apple version of this is a barebones iCloud page that doesn’t even show you what a shortcut does. There should be a way to make sure that a single shortcut link is able to always show the latest version of any given shortcut.
3. Stable Infrastructure
That brings us to a request for more investment in the stability of the infrastructure that maintains shortcuts. In early 2021, we witnessed an iCloud issue, as reported on MacStories, that prevented anyone from downloading older shortcuts for around 24 hours.
Think about it. Every shortcut ever created couldn’t be downloaded afresh until Apple fixed the problem on its end. If you’re heavily invested in Shortcuts, such outages would dent your confidence in the ecosystem.
We hope this kind of problem doesn’t recur and if it does, we hope Apple keeps fixing it promptly.
4. Better Backups and Versioning
This is also why Apple absolutely needs to find better ways for people to back up their shortcuts. Yes, you can sync your shortcuts across multiple devices via iCloud, but remember that iCloud is a sync service, not a true backup service.
If you delete a shortcut from one device, it’ll be deleted from all your devices.
Something like a Time Machine backup for Shortcuts would be great to have. People spend a lot of time and effort in creating these shortcuts, and it absolutely deserves a better backup service.
One of the best features of shortcuts is that anyone can download a shortcut, modify it slightly to suit their needs, and use it. If you do this often, or if you create new shortcuts regularly, you’ll be stuck with several copies of the same shortcut that clutters the My Shortcuts page in the Shortcuts app.
This is where the ability to store various versions of one shortcut under the same name would help. This way, you could make multiple versions of the same shortcut and choose not to clutter the My Shortcuts tab.
5. Create and Save Multiple Actions as a Group
Speaking of features that would reduce the amount of time it takes to create and maintain shortcuts, Apple should think about allowing people to group multiple sets of commonly used actions and copy them across shortcuts.
For example, if you often make shortcuts that download images from a website, resize them to certain resolutions, and copy them to clipboard, then you should be able to group these actions and copy them to a new shortcut easily.
These groups should be saved to a new location in the Shortcuts app for easy access too.
6. Display Entire Shortcuts Inside Widgets
The Shortcuts widget in iOS 14 allows you to view and run your favorite shortcuts. This is good, but we can’t stop wishing for a Scriptable-like feature where you can create beautiful widgets from right inside the Shortcuts app.
For instance, it would be amazing if you could write a shortcut that pulls weather data and displays it in a widget on your home screen.
7. Shareable Automations
Automation is a part of the Shortcuts app that Apple has siloed for some unknown reason. Ideally you should be able to share your automation routines with others, just as you share regular shortcuts.
People create lots of amazing automation, but if you want to try them yourself, then you’ll have to painstakingly recreate them yourself. Apple can and should fix this.
8. The Ability to Duplicate Automations
Apple doesn’t allow you to duplicate your own automations. This means that if you want to change your watch face four times a day, you'll have to create four automations manually. This could be sped up immensely by duplicating automations, and Apple could presumably add this feature with ease.
The Future Is Automated
We’re living in an exciting era for iPhone and iPad automations. With just a few quick tweaks, Apple can really improve the experience for casual and advanced users alike.
The world of Apple Watch automations is just as exciting, and you should definitely give the Shortcuts app a try to see what you can come up with.