Shortcuts Reviews

UPDATE: In the ~10 months since I originally left this review, they’ve made one minor feature update. Still pointless and at this rate it always will be. Reducing to rating from 2 stars to one, as development seems effectively dead.

I like where they’re going with this but in its current state it has extremely limited functionality. It’s kind of strange; even really simple, obvious stuff is missing from a lot of the built in apps. For example, you can get an ETA to a destination from Maps but there’s no way to return any information about the route. So I can get it to tell me how long it’s going to take to get to work in the morning but will not get any indication of which of the numerous routes it’s referring to. Ok, no problem, I’ll get directions and parse out some route details... nope, the only map directions-related actions open the Maps app, you can’t just have it return text. I don’t want or need this because I’m not going to navigate a route I drive multiple times a week, I just want “19 mins via Highway 123”. I’ve thought up a dozen different this app I’ve wanted to make but only had one not turn out to be infeasible the apps limitations. Maybe this will be great after a couple years of development. Right now, it’s a novelty.

Deleted this garbage today after almost two weeks of it crashing on open 100% of the time. Absolutely worthless abandonware. Original review:

Is it supposed to crash on open 100% of the time? Just checking to make sure. It’s strange to see a crash-on-open app billed as an efficiency app of any sort. Not sure what’s so efficient about an app whose sole purpose, 100% of the time, is to crash on open. Why would an app (whose sole purpose is to crash on open 100% of the time) even be offered in Shortcuts Store? Not sure what sort of function such an app fulfills, but then again, I’m not a software engineer. Were I a software engineer, I would certainly put my efforts toward creating and maintaining an app that does not crash fully 100% of the time on open. But then again, if my job was to create an app whose sole purpose WAS to crash 100% of the time on open, I suppose I’d have done my job and done it well, concerning Shortcuts. So “this app” is short for “this app to crashing on open 100% of the time,” then. Understood.

I used workflow everyday!! I build several recipes that were all based around shrinking and cropping photos and doing light color treatment. It was fast and easy. Sending lower sized images on text was faster especially if you have low connectivity. Who needs an 8mb image when a 260k image is perfectly acceptable? Now my recipes still work for resizing thankfully, but why Apple did you remove almost all the photo functions? No more editor only Markup!?! It is at best a poor PDF tool that doesn't work well for that. Please return photo editing functionality. Sometimes I don't want to Take an photo in camera, open it, edit in one of my 15 photo edit tools, save it back only then to run my "shortcut". Shortcut is supposed to save me time!! Now it is all but useless, I will still shrink some photos but now I will just go back to using an editor. Could you not add access to the Photos app and all its tools? Seems like a no brainier to build functionality into all your own apps like settings and photos? Please fix it.

I installed this app and was looking forward to a fun first shortcut/automation to run. So My first step in my project was to simply make it start a screen recording. Option is not available?
Needs more features and base functions for my example screen recording features. Adding in “record my steps or clicks” also having the ability of running as a background operation. Some of which can be done inside pythonista scripts but everyday users aren’t going to want to learn python in order to make something useful from this app.
I understand apple has left this on Shortcuts developers themselves to further integrate apps. So be a step ahead and further the integration on the iPhone base operations so that the users have more control on automation as well. This would not only look great on the this app team but also develop a creative mindset community. Mr. Jobs would have loved to see something like this develop so far, please don’t let this die and further give access to the base operations back to the users.

Some of the this app just don’t work. They don’t have the correct components to make the widget work. The tea timer was adding 180 to the calculator instead of the timer which made no sense at all. The record button will record but won’t save anywhere unless you go in and tell it where to save it to (just recently lost the recording of an important test review because of this). No where in the gallery does it tell you that you have to edit the widgets of course if you want to you can but you HAVE to edit the widgets to be them to work! This isn’t for all of them though some widgets work just fine once you download them from the gallery which gives off the impression that if you download it then it should work without you having to go in a add/change things. SAVE YOUR SELF THE STRESS AND TIME JUST TAKE THE 10 EXTRA SECONDS TO DO THE ACTION YOURSELF. Shortcuts makes things more complicated than its worth. Once set up properly it bet it’s great but it’s screwed me over one too many times

this app is a very fun to learn app but has been very buggy. There appears to be several bugs in Shortcuts. Here are six bugs you need to fix.

1. The wrong variables are displayed for actions when using Magic Variable feature. This happens every time the Actions page for any of my this app is opened.
2. Actions lag and glitch out or disappear randomly when scrolling through them or after selecting a Magic Variable from an action.
3. The icons disappear from variables or other elements of Shortcuts .
4. The search bar always works but sometimes does not reveal the list of actions and is hidden underneath the on screen keyboard.
5. After using Shortcuts to add or modify a lot of actions it slows down my device. This happens on both my iPhone X and my very old iPhone 5s (both running iOS 12.1) and after I experience a lot of the bugs starting at number 2, Shortcuts crashes. I think whats is happening is Shortcuts is using so much of the devices RAM which causes it to slow down my device and crash.
6. THE WORST ONE OF ALL! As of recently after Shortcuts crashes and I reopen it, most of the time it says that the this app Database is Corrupted and give me options, one that resets this app entirely which could of DESTROYED ALL OF THE this app I HAD CREATED! I simply select exit app and reopen it and it went back to normal like nothing ever happened.

There is a lot Apple has to fix with this app before it becomes a useful app for a lot of people.

I loaded Shortcuts some time ago and failed to come up with any useful workflows. Social media workflows I found did nothing for me personally. Finally. I created a workflow that pushes to IFTTT and the world is my oyster. While testing I found a bug. I submitted an email and it took the devs a long time to respond but they acknowledged the bug and are working on it. I use Shortcuts every day, several times per day to track my time and mileage on various consulting gigs. Everything pushes to google sheets where formulas finish the heavy lifting. The time vested to create and test the workflows has paid off and I wish I had done it sooner. Spend the time on Shortcuts, you won't be disappointed.

Update for the change to this app.
The IFTTT functionality has been removed. While I found a workaround using the share sheet, it requires I intervene and make selections while the shortcut runs. This has not “shortcut” the workflow, it added extra steps that are prone to my error. Please add IFTTT back.

Pretty good, but needs some more work from Apple to be great. For instance, you can have it open Find my Friends, but you can’t have it pull a friends location to do something simple like “ETA to Friend.” ETA home is nice, but I’d rather have it pull ETA to wife to send her since I sometime meet her out.

When you add in the Home app the issues really start to show. For instance I have a “goodnight” setting that turns of the TV, turns off my patio lights and dims my living room and kitchen lights to 75%, it then waits 30 seconds and dims more and repeats that until everything is off. The problem is that it doesn’t ignore an unnecessary command, it just fails. If the TV is already off the whole string stops, the same with any lights. The convenience is lost when I can’t have it be a universal command for every time I go to bed.

Hopefully they’ll continue to improve it and more third party apps will add support.

While I use it every day, Shortcuts suffers from Apple’s UI oversimplification and attempts to integrate Siri actions with their iOS version of Automator. As a result, you don’t always know which icon to push to do a thing. Certain workflows are unintuitive to build (e.g. I shouldn’t need two steps to ping a URL). And getting workflows from other applications needs a lot of work - the whole “you have to perform an action in Shortcuts to make it appear” thing makes this app feel limited, not powerful.

And the widget... woof. The buttons are ever-so-slightly too small. I don’t mis-tap, but I wish the tap areas were larger. And using workflows that have interactivity (alerts or inputs) often makes them flat out freeze up, requiring me to open up Shortcuts just to run them, especially if I trigger a second workflow while a first is just... hanging.

But, hey, it’s not bad for what it is. But it could be a lot better.

I mainly liked workflow becuase it was a quick and convenient way to make PDFs out of pictures, which is often how handwritten papers are submitted. The problem is all of a sudden it became useless for that a while ago. Now I take the pictures run the routine to select them and turn them into a PDF and it spits them back out in a random order. It didn't used to do that, but now it does for whatever reason.

It's incredibly frustrating to have to go and look through 20 pages of a PDF to make sure they're all in the right order only to do it all over again when I find one or two of them are just in some random spot for no reason.

I'm not giving it 1 star because that's not all Shortcuts can do or all I use it for, but its 90% of the reason I use it and it's become a huge hassle everytime.

This is a good app. I am glad to see the ability to create Siri this app. However, while it has more functionality, it is not as stable as Workflow. Apple Watch functionality has been largely crippled, as it can only run this app that don’t have menu options such as logging caffeine or setting a tea timer. It is great to see some advanced functions like running an script over SSH, but it is missing some of the basics capturing a webpage to Notes (like Evernote can).

this app also needs a training manual to help us learn how these commands work. It is powerful, but that comes with complexity.

At the end of the day, this app is a great idea, but at the end of the day, we need our digital assistants to be simple. They need to understand us. Having to train them this way isn’t going to further our adoption. Automation is great in its own right, but a digital assistant needs to be easy, simple, adaptive to us, able to understand us in context, in tone, etc. this app is great for automation, but not a true replacement for the work needed to make Siri a serious tool in the digital assistant space.

Workflow was the #1 app for me on my Apple Watch, beside activity. With it, I could easily log information (like caffeine or water) directly into the health app merely by tapping a complication on the watch face. I used it to track notes and requests I would get throughout the day. However, with this app, those capabilities are severely limited, and if I would like to do the same things, I have to speak directly to Siri to execute them, something that is not normally convenient for me. Please add a this app app to the Apple Watch, or at least allow Shortcut complications on the Watch.

Beyond that complaint, I truly love this app. The ability to link with so many different apps is amazing, and I do appreciate its simplicity and capability. I just don’t use it nearly as much as I would (or as much as I used Workflow) merely because it is not easily accessible through the Watch.

First off, the this app app is amazing for what it can do so far. I, like many others, was hyped out of my mind by the announcement, and was somewhat disappointed with the end result from iOS12. But I've made quite a few this app so far that let me do some stuff I do every once in a while, but it's not an everyday thing as it was advertised, or as I'd hoped. There are so many things such as 'send a notification' that will pioneer the future of Shortcuts, but the thing that's really missing is automation and triggers other than pressing a button on my device. Universally, it could start out with 'when I open an app' or 'when I receive a certain notification' and eventually branch out to provide support for devs to add their own triggers. This is really the only thing missing from this app being an everyday essential. Until then, IFTTT will be one of the only options for iOS users (although limited)

I’ve enjoyed making music playlists that launch with one click. I started adding music to my home screen on my IPhone X. I started have major problems with my phone, namely it kept going into black screen when I did basic tasks. I did several restores, one from iCloud backup and another from ITunes but the problem continued. I thought that I had a hardware issue so I got a new iPhone X and loaded all my apps from Shortcuts Store. The Apple store ‘genius’ concluded that I probably had a faulty iCloud backup. But I had the same problem on my new iPhone! Fortunately, I was finally able to fix the problem by deleting all the playlists that I had added to my home screen. For some reason, this action of adding playlists to the home screen from within Shortcuts caused my IPhone X to constantly freeze. I was very lucky to find this fix because all the experts couldn’t figure out what the problem was.

Apparently this is the easiest way for me to make a feature request 🙄 Anyway, I’ve been using Shortcuts before Apple took it over, and it’s generally really useful. I do have a few complaints though:

1. The new UI flow for creating a shortcut is generally hard to use. I understand why the this app are on a card at the bottom now, b/c it gives more of a feeling of being able to flip back and forth, but you have to pull the card up from the bottom slowly or else you pull up the widget screen, and what’s on the card first is suggestions (not what I want) & I have to tap on the search bar to bring up the actual categories and get over to Favorites (generally what I want to see first).

2. There are still some gaps in terms of actions. For example, the reason I’m writing this review is that I want to change a reminder from checked to unchecked through this app, but the only option I have is to delete the reminder instead, an action that requires three confirmations before executing. That’s a major slowdown to my script. Plz add this feature.

I had used the Workflow app for a while before they joined apple, and it blew my mind how completely it improved the way I interact with my phone. Now that Workflow has changed to this app Shortcuts is so much faster and seems much more deeply integrated into iOS. Editing this app is much more intuitive now that the actions menu remains available at the bottom of the screen. The visual redesign is also really refreshing. It still amazes me that I can do so much with Shortcuts.

My only complaints: I have Drafts 4 installed but this app doesn’t recognize it and continues to redirect me to Shortcuts store to download. This is a huge pain as many of my this app are based on that version of Drafts. Additionally, the Drafts actions show the icon for Drafts 5, but the actions themselves refer to Drafts 4 (the “View in App Store” link even directs me to Drafts 4, which I already have installed).

My other smaller complaint is that I wish there were more connections to system settings - I would love to be able to turn rotation lock off or on with one click, or access and update my alarms via this app but neither of these seem to be possible (yet).

Like the title says, it actually works! Not like other apps claiming to be able to change app icons and not work, this one does! You also get to choose what image Shortcuts is so thats a plus! Overall I’m very happy with Shortcuts and its functionality🤩. It makes customizing your iphone homescreen even more the better while being fairly easy to use. While everything else is good, the only thing that keeps it from a 5☆ review would be its color range/selection when customizing an app. When going for a certain aesthetic in color, the shades are very important and the limited color choice sadly puts a damper over it😔. In the end, i reccommend trying out Shortcuts :))))

Shortcuts is amazing and I am loving what all Shortcuts can do! I enjoy watching videos of people design their own this app and then make one that works for me. A couple of suggestions to make for future versions:
Can we have a few instructional videos for new comers to learn to make their own this app? Maybe a few varieties of beginning, intermediate and advanced.
Can we have a better way of searching or seeing all of the commands that this app has in its library?
Last but not least, can there be a way to set a clock alarm to a specific and not “suggested” enable or disable time? I would love to set a clock alarm based on a variable. See the Set Brightness command where you can change it from a slider to a place where you can input a number or variable. My goal is to have Siri ask me what time I want to get up and have her take my speech input, store it as a variable and pass it to a new clock alarm.
Thanks for the great app and I look forward to seeing its improvements.

Wow Shortcuts is great. I love every bit of it and it is going to make my day operate so much smoother. It’s easy to put together and fun as well (can’t stop making this app). I say just spend some time with it and you will quickly learn Shortcuts . I also love the how preset this app are available to give examples and help you learn new tools. You can edit these in any way just as if you made it from scratch.

The only thing I would like to see (so far) is when I am making a shortcut to start a playlist in music, I wish I could set up a list of multiple specific playlists to choose from rather than having to make a short cut for each individual playlist. So maybe in the next update you can add this option as well. For example: I have many music playlists but I would like to add my top three to access on the fly.

Five gold stars 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 Apple wins again!

I've already made workflows to mass delete any number of photos from my camera roll and also get latitude & longitude from Apple Maps. I also used it with regex to scrape PDFs that were containerized in JavaScript AJAX stuff which prevented downloading Of said PDFs the normal way. Oh and I created an MPG logger so I can track performance of my vehicles using a CSV text file on Dropbox. I can't wait to develop more useful workflows. I'm so very happy this functionality all takes place CLIENT SIDE and not server side like If This Then That. I use Shortcuts to fetch evapotranspiration rate of the day before from a State website using JSON. I also have created a workflow that takes all my Markdown journal entries from Dropbox (filenamed with dates) and puts them into Calendar with an X-Callback-URL. Then I can load journal entries using Calendar and my favorite Markdown app 1Writer side-by-side. Awesome stuff.

So happy Apple is still maintaining Shortcuts!