6 ms·

Apple Shortcuts is falling into "the automation gap"

111 points by walterbell 2y ago

rcarmo 2y ago
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).
- jessekv 2y ago
  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.
- TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
  This is so typically Apple. You can do incredible things with AppleScript and Automator, but the process can be painful. 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.
  - walterbell 2y ago
    > Someone put a lot of effort into designing that system. https://9to5mac.com/2016/11/17/mac-user-automation-sal-soghoian/ https://9to5mac.com/2016/11/17/mac-user-automation-sal-sogho... 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 Is HomeAssistant popular on Apple platforms?
    - theshrike79 2y ago
      Yes and no. You can use HA as a "bridge" in HomeKit for example. So you add your automation crap to HA, scan a QR code from HA and everything pops up in HomeKit For me that was a bit oof, as it literally adds _everything_. So I just use Apple TV as a HomeKit hub with the basic stuff added directly to it and a few specific devices (Shelly) bridged from HA using a whitelist. This way the WAF stays high and Siri works properly. HA still does the more complicated stuff (ATV is on pause -> make lights in the TV are a bit brighter. ATV playing -> dim the lights according to the time of day etc.
      - nunez 2y ago
        You can create separate HK bridges for groups of devices to prevent _everything_ from showing up.
      - mleo 2y ago
        Home Assistant is to HomeKit is very much like AppleScript/scripting languages are to Shortcuts. The UI based approach is OK, but only takes you so far because there is not proper investment to improve a deeper integration. To make the most and easiest management of the system often requires using a more capable system and bridging the two.
    - hoseyor 2y ago
      That unfortunately sounds precisely like the post Jobs Apple, get rid of real computer talent “for business reasons”, probably because he didn’t check enough virtue signal boxes or didn’t enthusiastically enough support everyone checking their boxes together; while also forging ahead with poorly conceived lines of “business” like Apple Vision and this rumored home automation that at least to me seems like pattern of poorly conceived, poorly executed, poorly timed business decisions. It was somewhat recently that I read something about what I’ve also felt personally, that people haven’t really warmed up to the whole home automation idea. At least speaking for my own feelings about it, it’s largely because it’s unreasonably expensive for most people, an unreasonably challenging task to set up even with perfect conditions of a single company’s products, unreasonable complexity that introduces unreasonable brittleness, and an unreasonable mental load on having yet another complex, brittle thing to have to manage. It’s the antithesis of what Apple stood for at a time. Apple succeeded because it abstracted having to be an engineer to do things. It’s why so many engineers hate Apple because of the “walled garden” and are smitten with Linux and Android because you can accomplish the same thing in 1000 ways, but none of them frictionless or even clearly, simply and consistently documented. It’s something the engineer minded don’t seem to commonly understand, people don’t want to be engineers like you to live their lives. You go to a restaurant so you don’t have to cook, not because you have to make 1000 decisions before you even get any food, it’s why I eventually switched to iOS when I did, and it was honestly a kind of weight off my shoulders because I had gotten tired of the self-centered maybe even narcissistic nature of things like Linux and Android. Maybe a measure of business and product success should be the rankings of how easy it is to explain it to your Nanna and her using it … Nanna Arena, anyone? But even if Apple can inject its famous “just works” magic into home automation, it is combatting its own entropy that has been slowly introducing bugs, glitches, and brittleness over the years. Does anyone feel like calling for Siri 8 times and being ignored before having to hold a button or simply just do it manually in frustration, with a system that costs $10,000 just to turn on your lights? This is the company that charges $1000 for a monitor stand that is a piece of aluminum, I can’t even imagine the price of a 6” wall mounted screen, let alone an Apple robotic iPad arm. Not to mention it seems unlikely to me considering Apple’s abandonment of things like AirPort and the fumbled HomePods. It all just feels like a typical recent core nature of Apple, too late to the wrong party because the company has been not just taken over, but overtaken by people who want to ride a wave to feel good rather than do good effective work. But that’s just me. Does anything I’ve said resonate with anyone else? I get hints and glimpses of it here and there when I can tell myself, “I guess I’m not just imagining it”, and maybe something is very off at Apple.
  - emchammer 2y ago
    Three different scripting tools and I am not sure which is the right one to use. Also, I have been noticing more AI-generated slop comments on this discussion board.
- bredren 2y ago
  > we still have Automator 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?
internet_points 2y ago
I recently learnt that you can use Shortcuts to enable power-saving mode on unplugging from the charger. It's amazing. Now I no longer regularly go around turning on power-save on all my family's devices to avoid them hogging all the chargers right before a trip.
jtrn 2y ago
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!
- theglenn88_ 2y ago
  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.
  - jjcob 2y ago
    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.
- dev0p 2y ago
  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.
- qsort 2y ago
  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...
jbverschoor 2y ago
Shortcuts fails for programmer and for non-programmers. This is the result where you don’t know your audience
dawnerd 2y ago
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.
aucisson_masque 2y ago
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.
- ubercore 2y ago
  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.
  - aucisson_masque 2y ago
    Simple stuff, like compressing a pdf. I couldn't figure out how to do it using tasker.
- doix 2y ago
  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. [0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.dinglisch.android.taskerm https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.dinglisch.... [1] https://server47.de/automation/ https://server47.de/automation/
  - stavros 2y ago
    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.
jfernandezr 2y ago
I only have configured a task in Shortcuts that I find useful. I'm a freelance, and sometimes I have to use my personal car to do some work. So, I did a task that I voice activate on CarPlay in order to record the current mileage into a Notes note, storing the current date and the voice transcribed mileage. I could not find another use for Shortcuts because there aren't enough integrated apps.
- haiku2077 2y ago
  I use shortcuts to automatically start a specific music playlist based on the current time of day when my phone connects to my motorcycle's helmet audio system. I also have it automatically play music when I turn on the cheap waterproof bluetooth speaker in my bathroom. Finally, I used it to create an alarm that selects different music based on what I've been listening to recently instead of a static song I have to pick manually in advance.
- jtbayly 2y ago
  I use it similarly. In fact, I used to use it with Notes for this exact purpose. However, I improved it by recording the info into a Numbers spreadsheet now. Makes reporting and calculations easier.
walterbell 2y ago
iOS 18 shortcuts can be added to control center, https://support.apple.com/en-us/121131 https://support.apple.com/en-us/121131 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-ios-apple-shortcuts/ 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-drafts/ 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.
hn_throw2025 2y ago
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.
- walterbell 2y ago
  > I couldn't do all that with.. Amazon Echo 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.
  - hn_throw2025 2y ago
    Very true. 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…
  - Spivak 2y ago
    Is there any reason people won't just use the MCP server without an LLM?
    - meindnoch 2y ago
      T-that's illegal!
jen20 2y ago
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.
ErneX 2y ago
Even though they are a bit limited I still find Shortcuts very useful. I have one that adds a global share option that triggers the download of any X video. I also have a few that run a Python script via a-Shell mini.
oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
The most useful Shortcut I've written on macOS is a simple 'toggle dark mode'. It's very simple and works as a good 'first task' if you've never used the app before. I wrote up the process here: https://medium.com/@bobbyjack/how-to-toggle-macos-dark-mode-with-a-shortcut-ef804dc6925f?sk=3fe30ee1ed98bfdf715c473bc9225a4d https://medium.com/@bobbyjack/how-to-toggle-macos-dark-mode-... Overall, Shortcuts feels like a nice polished app, but it's definitely severely lacking compared to Automator.
- xeonmc 2y ago
  iOS already has a built-in Action Center button for toggling dark mode, I'm surprised that there isn't a first-party equivalent on MacOS.
  - SSLy 2y ago
    macOS has this behind 3 clicks: Action Center > Display (the bar above the brightness) > button just like on iOS appears.
    - oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
      I may actually retire my shortcut now, thanks! I hadn't ever noticed the subtle greater-than symbol that appears to the right of "Display" when you hover over it—Apple and discoverability, eh?
      - SSLy 2y ago
        I'm a very fresh macOS user and noticed it there day one -- which was just a week ago shrug
        oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
        I don't think that's totally unexpected. As a fresh macOS user, you're probably exploring a bit more than I would with every new OS revision!
mrtksn 2y ago
Shortcuts should have been in "Vibe coding" style. I find it frustrating to use because unlike with straight coding the UI is verbose and its abilities are cryptic. Instead of this cumbersome UI they should have provided a UI where you just normal Swift and ability to generate that Swift from prompting.
citizenkeen 2y ago
This post uses the term “automation gap”, in quotes, in its title and then never uses it in the body. About to go Google what it means but that’s mildly annoying and/or bad writing.
sholladay 2y ago
I’ve been struggling to make a simple “door left open too long” alarm. The first problem I ran into was weird inconsistencies between personal shortcuts that run on your device vs home shortcuts that run on HomePod. For example, there is no Speak Text action on HomePod, so I can’t have the alarm say “front door open” unless it runs on my phone, which means it won’t work when I’m not home. Oh well, a generic alarm sound will have to do. Oh wait, it doesn’t have that, either. The alarm sound has to come from Apple Music. That means this alarm relies on the internet! Oh well. At least there are plenty of sound effects albums on there. Hey, why isn’t the alarm working today? Oh, that album was taken down, probably due to a copyright dispute. That’s annoying, but at least there are plenty more to choose from. WTF, it’s not working again, only a month later, same thing. Fine, more whack—a-mole… Next problem: I had to set the alarm sound to play at high volume since the effect itself is relatively quiet. Woah! That volume is permanent and now after an alarm, everything plays loud. Ok, no problem. I’ll just have the shortcut get the current volume and save it to a variable at the beginning and then change the volume to that variable at the end. Oh, there’s no way to set the volume to the value of a variable? WTF? The HomePod has actions for resizing and rotating images, even though it doesn’t have a display, but it can’t do what I need it to as a speaker?! Alright, hardcoded 50% volume will have to do. Final problem: My shortcut repeatedly waits a few seconds and then checks the state of a door sensor in a loop. It would be nice if I could have a condition to exit the loop early but keep running the rest of the shortcut. Oh, Apple made a whole scripting system for shortcuts but didn’t include a `break` keyword. Lovely. I officially have a love/hate relationship with shortcuts, which leans towards hate most of the time.
nunez 2y ago
Shortcuts is the most useful and frustrating app on my phone. I have tons of Shortcuts. They're excellent when they work. It's extremely frustrating when they don't. Maybe your Shortcut uses an action that is no longer available in the version of iOS you updated to (and wasn't marked as deprecated in the changelog). Maybe the app that the action relies on send an unusual response, which Shortcuts won't tell you because it's way of error handling is "leave the user more confused than they started with". Maybe Shortcuts decided to just keep itself running in the background forever for no reason (which is even more frustrating given that apps like Music will get killed by the memory manager _WHILE THEY'RE PLAYING MUSIC_, something that should never happen on the latest iPhone). Despite it's shortcomings, it's still better and a hell of a lot easier to use than Tasker, it's third-party equivalent on Android (because it, surprisingly, doesn't have an automation tool built-in).
impish9208 2y ago
I made one to connect to VPN when I leave my place (disconnect from my home wifi), and disconnect from VPN when I’m back. The only thing I don’t like is that it generates a notification on the lock screen whenever it runs, and there’s no way to disable that.
- walterbell 2y ago
  Can the notification be timed/transient?
  - impish9208 2y ago
    Nope, it’s immediate. Probably a security-minded decision.
hirvi74 2y ago
I spend way more time with automation on a macOS than I probably should. I need a new hobby. . . Anyway, something I do appreciate about Shortcuts is that most shortcuts can be invoked via CLI, so one can do some interesting things with them. Honestly though, I still prefer AppleScript and/or Swift for most automation.
- superb_dev 2y ago
  Woah I didn’t know you could invoke shortcuts with the CLI! Then again, I’m not sure that I really knew shortcuts were available on Mac. This is a game changer for me
hackerbeat 2y ago
Shortcuts is too complicated. Most folks have a hard time using it.
undebuggable 2y ago
Shortcuts are disappointingly undocumented and incapable. Once had few shortcuts to push arriving text messages to multiple devices. It worked surprisingly well by creating CalDAV reminder. CalDAV reminders can be synchronised everywhere from Thunderbird on Linux, through DAVx on Android, to Outlook on Windows. Then suddently with an iOS update the Shortcuts lost permission to create reminders. Old shortucts worked but no way to create new ones. What can I do with Shortcuts right now, enable bluetooth on connecting to Wi-Fi? Why bother?
DidYaWipe 2y ago
Apple can't even get SwiftUI into a competent state. Creating comprehensive system-wide scripting? I can't imagine this, and would prefer that resources be spent shoring up Apple's increasingly shitty frameworks.
danhau 2y ago
I use shortcuts to quickly create a QR code for the page I‘m viewing in Safari. I also use it to delete old photos in my Photos library. And it‘s also useful for setting up „emergency contacts“ on my homescreen. You can make it call random numbers, you don‘t have to add them to contacts first, which is nice. Good enough for my small quality of life improvements.

111 points by walterbell 2y ago

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).

jessekv 2y ago
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.
TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
This is so typically Apple. You can do incredible things with AppleScript and Automator, but the process can be painful. 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.
- walterbell 2y ago
  > Someone put a lot of effort into designing that system. https://9to5mac.com/2016/11/17/mac-user-automation-sal-soghoian/ https://9to5mac.com/2016/11/17/mac-user-automation-sal-sogho... 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 Is HomeAssistant popular on Apple platforms?
  - theshrike79 2y ago
    Yes and no. You can use HA as a "bridge" in HomeKit for example. So you add your automation crap to HA, scan a QR code from HA and everything pops up in HomeKit For me that was a bit oof, as it literally adds _everything_. So I just use Apple TV as a HomeKit hub with the basic stuff added directly to it and a few specific devices (Shelly) bridged from HA using a whitelist. This way the WAF stays high and Siri works properly. HA still does the more complicated stuff (ATV is on pause -> make lights in the TV are a bit brighter. ATV playing -> dim the lights according to the time of day etc.
    - nunez 2y ago
      You can create separate HK bridges for groups of devices to prevent _everything_ from showing up.
    - mleo 2y ago
      Home Assistant is to HomeKit is very much like AppleScript/scripting languages are to Shortcuts. The UI based approach is OK, but only takes you so far because there is not proper investment to improve a deeper integration. To make the most and easiest management of the system often requires using a more capable system and bridging the two.
  - hoseyor 2y ago
    That unfortunately sounds precisely like the post Jobs Apple, get rid of real computer talent “for business reasons”, probably because he didn’t check enough virtue signal boxes or didn’t enthusiastically enough support everyone checking their boxes together; while also forging ahead with poorly conceived lines of “business” like Apple Vision and this rumored home automation that at least to me seems like pattern of poorly conceived, poorly executed, poorly timed business decisions. It was somewhat recently that I read something about what I’ve also felt personally, that people haven’t really warmed up to the whole home automation idea. At least speaking for my own feelings about it, it’s largely because it’s unreasonably expensive for most people, an unreasonably challenging task to set up even with perfect conditions of a single company’s products, unreasonable complexity that introduces unreasonable brittleness, and an unreasonable mental load on having yet another complex, brittle thing to have to manage. It’s the antithesis of what Apple stood for at a time. Apple succeeded because it abstracted having to be an engineer to do things. It’s why so many engineers hate Apple because of the “walled garden” and are smitten with Linux and Android because you can accomplish the same thing in 1000 ways, but none of them frictionless or even clearly, simply and consistently documented. It’s something the engineer minded don’t seem to commonly understand, people don’t want to be engineers like you to live their lives. You go to a restaurant so you don’t have to cook, not because you have to make 1000 decisions before you even get any food, it’s why I eventually switched to iOS when I did, and it was honestly a kind of weight off my shoulders because I had gotten tired of the self-centered maybe even narcissistic nature of things like Linux and Android. Maybe a measure of business and product success should be the rankings of how easy it is to explain it to your Nanna and her using it … Nanna Arena, anyone? But even if Apple can inject its famous “just works” magic into home automation, it is combatting its own entropy that has been slowly introducing bugs, glitches, and brittleness over the years. Does anyone feel like calling for Siri 8 times and being ignored before having to hold a button or simply just do it manually in frustration, with a system that costs $10,000 just to turn on your lights? This is the company that charges $1000 for a monitor stand that is a piece of aluminum, I can’t even imagine the price of a 6” wall mounted screen, let alone an Apple robotic iPad arm. Not to mention it seems unlikely to me considering Apple’s abandonment of things like AirPort and the fumbled HomePods. It all just feels like a typical recent core nature of Apple, too late to the wrong party because the company has been not just taken over, but overtaken by people who want to ride a wave to feel good rather than do good effective work. But that’s just me. Does anything I’ve said resonate with anyone else? I get hints and glimpses of it here and there when I can tell myself, “I guess I’m not just imagining it”, and maybe something is very off at Apple.
- emchammer 2y ago
  Three different scripting tools and I am not sure which is the right one to use. Also, I have been noticing more AI-generated slop comments on this discussion board.
bredren 2y ago
> we still have Automator 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?

internet_points 2y ago

I recently learnt that you can use Shortcuts to enable power-saving mode on unplugging from the charger. It's amazing. Now I no longer regularly go around turning on power-save on all my family's devices to avoid them hogging all the chargers right before a trip.

jtrn 2y ago

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!

theglenn88_ 2y ago
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.
- jjcob 2y ago
  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.
dev0p 2y ago
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.
qsort 2y ago
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...

jbverschoor 2y ago

Shortcuts fails for programmer and for non-programmers. This is the result where you don’t know your audience

dawnerd 2y ago

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.

aucisson_masque 2y ago

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.

ubercore 2y ago
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.
- aucisson_masque 2y ago
  Simple stuff, like compressing a pdf. I couldn't figure out how to do it using tasker.
doix 2y ago
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. [0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.dinglisch.android.taskerm https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.dinglisch.... [1] https://server47.de/automation/ https://server47.de/automation/
- stavros 2y ago
  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.

jfernandezr 2y ago

I only have configured a task in Shortcuts that I find useful. I'm a freelance, and sometimes I have to use my personal car to do some work. So, I did a task that I voice activate on CarPlay in order to record the current mileage into a Notes note, storing the current date and the voice transcribed mileage. I could not find another use for Shortcuts because there aren't enough integrated apps.

haiku2077 2y ago
I use shortcuts to automatically start a specific music playlist based on the current time of day when my phone connects to my motorcycle's helmet audio system. I also have it automatically play music when I turn on the cheap waterproof bluetooth speaker in my bathroom. Finally, I used it to create an alarm that selects different music based on what I've been listening to recently instead of a static song I have to pick manually in advance.
jtbayly 2y ago
I use it similarly. In fact, I used to use it with Notes for this exact purpose. However, I improved it by recording the info into a Numbers spreadsheet now. Makes reporting and calculations easier.

walterbell 2y ago

iOS 18 shortcuts can be added to control center, https://support.apple.com/en-us/121131 https://support.apple.com/en-us/121131 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-ios-apple-shortcuts/ 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-drafts/ 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.

hn_throw2025 2y ago

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.

walterbell 2y ago
> I couldn't do all that with.. Amazon Echo 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.
- hn_throw2025 2y ago
  Very true. 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…
- Spivak 2y ago
  Is there any reason people won't just use the MCP server without an LLM?
  - meindnoch 2y ago
    T-that's illegal!

jen20 2y ago

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.

ErneX 2y ago

Even though they are a bit limited I still find Shortcuts very useful. I have one that adds a global share option that triggers the download of any X video. I also have a few that run a Python script via a-Shell mini.

oneeyedpigeon 2y ago

The most useful Shortcut I've written on macOS is a simple 'toggle dark mode'. It's very simple and works as a good 'first task' if you've never used the app before. I wrote up the process here: https://medium.com/@bobbyjack/how-to-toggle-macos-dark-mode-with-a-shortcut-ef804dc6925f?sk=3fe30ee1ed98bfdf715c473bc9225a4d https://medium.com/@bobbyjack/how-to-toggle-macos-dark-mode-... Overall, Shortcuts feels like a nice polished app, but it's definitely severely lacking compared to Automator.

xeonmc 2y ago
iOS already has a built-in Action Center button for toggling dark mode, I'm surprised that there isn't a first-party equivalent on MacOS.
- SSLy 2y ago
  macOS has this behind 3 clicks: Action Center > Display (the bar above the brightness) > button just like on iOS appears.
  - oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
    I may actually retire my shortcut now, thanks! I hadn't ever noticed the subtle greater-than symbol that appears to the right of "Display" when you hover over it—Apple and discoverability, eh?
    - SSLy 2y ago
      I'm a very fresh macOS user and noticed it there day one -- which was just a week ago shrug
      - oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
        I don't think that's totally unexpected. As a fresh macOS user, you're probably exploring a bit more than I would with every new OS revision!

mrtksn 2y ago

Shortcuts should have been in "Vibe coding" style. I find it frustrating to use because unlike with straight coding the UI is verbose and its abilities are cryptic. Instead of this cumbersome UI they should have provided a UI where you just normal Swift and ability to generate that Swift from prompting.

citizenkeen 2y ago

This post uses the term “automation gap”, in quotes, in its title and then never uses it in the body. About to go Google what it means but that’s mildly annoying and/or bad writing.

sholladay 2y ago

I’ve been struggling to make a simple “door left open too long” alarm. The first problem I ran into was weird inconsistencies between personal shortcuts that run on your device vs home shortcuts that run on HomePod. For example, there is no Speak Text action on HomePod, so I can’t have the alarm say “front door open” unless it runs on my phone, which means it won’t work when I’m not home. Oh well, a generic alarm sound will have to do. Oh wait, it doesn’t have that, either. The alarm sound has to come from Apple Music. That means this alarm relies on the internet! Oh well. At least there are plenty of sound effects albums on there. Hey, why isn’t the alarm working today? Oh, that album was taken down, probably due to a copyright dispute. That’s annoying, but at least there are plenty more to choose from. WTF, it’s not working again, only a month later, same thing. Fine, more whack—a-mole… Next problem: I had to set the alarm sound to play at high volume since the effect itself is relatively quiet. Woah! That volume is permanent and now after an alarm, everything plays loud. Ok, no problem. I’ll just have the shortcut get the current volume and save it to a variable at the beginning and then change the volume to that variable at the end. Oh, there’s no way to set the volume to the value of a variable? WTF? The HomePod has actions for resizing and rotating images, even though it doesn’t have a display, but it can’t do what I need it to as a speaker?! Alright, hardcoded 50% volume will have to do. Final problem: My shortcut repeatedly waits a few seconds and then checks the state of a door sensor in a loop. It would be nice if I could have a condition to exit the loop early but keep running the rest of the shortcut. Oh, Apple made a whole scripting system for shortcuts but didn’t include a `break` keyword. Lovely. I officially have a love/hate relationship with shortcuts, which leans towards hate most of the time.

nunez 2y ago

Shortcuts is the most useful and frustrating app on my phone. I have tons of Shortcuts. They're excellent when they work. It's extremely frustrating when they don't. Maybe your Shortcut uses an action that is no longer available in the version of iOS you updated to (and wasn't marked as deprecated in the changelog). Maybe the app that the action relies on send an unusual response, which Shortcuts won't tell you because it's way of error handling is "leave the user more confused than they started with". Maybe Shortcuts decided to just keep itself running in the background forever for no reason (which is even more frustrating given that apps like Music will get killed by the memory manager _WHILE THEY'RE PLAYING MUSIC_, something that should never happen on the latest iPhone). Despite it's shortcomings, it's still better and a hell of a lot easier to use than Tasker, it's third-party equivalent on Android (because it, surprisingly, doesn't have an automation tool built-in).

impish9208 2y ago

I made one to connect to VPN when I leave my place (disconnect from my home wifi), and disconnect from VPN when I’m back. The only thing I don’t like is that it generates a notification on the lock screen whenever it runs, and there’s no way to disable that.

walterbell 2y ago
Can the notification be timed/transient?
- impish9208 2y ago
  Nope, it’s immediate. Probably a security-minded decision.

hirvi74 2y ago

I spend way more time with automation on a macOS than I probably should. I need a new hobby. . . Anyway, something I do appreciate about Shortcuts is that most shortcuts can be invoked via CLI, so one can do some interesting things with them. Honestly though, I still prefer AppleScript and/or Swift for most automation.

superb_dev 2y ago
Woah I didn’t know you could invoke shortcuts with the CLI! Then again, I’m not sure that I really knew shortcuts were available on Mac. This is a game changer for me

hackerbeat 2y ago

Shortcuts is too complicated. Most folks have a hard time using it.

undebuggable 2y ago

Shortcuts are disappointingly undocumented and incapable. Once had few shortcuts to push arriving text messages to multiple devices. It worked surprisingly well by creating CalDAV reminder. CalDAV reminders can be synchronised everywhere from Thunderbird on Linux, through DAVx on Android, to Outlook on Windows. Then suddently with an iOS update the Shortcuts lost permission to create reminders. Old shortucts worked but no way to create new ones. What can I do with Shortcuts right now, enable bluetooth on connecting to Wi-Fi? Why bother?

DidYaWipe 2y ago

Apple can't even get SwiftUI into a competent state. Creating comprehensive system-wide scripting? I can't imagine this, and would prefer that resources be spent shoring up Apple's increasingly shitty frameworks.

danhau 2y ago

I use shortcuts to quickly create a QR code for the page I‘m viewing in Safari. I also use it to delete old photos in my Photos library. And it‘s also useful for setting up „emergency contacts“ on my homescreen. You can make it call random numbers, you don‘t have to add them to contacts first, which is nice. Good enough for my small quality of life improvements.