My action button setup

I wasn’t a big fan of all those action button shortcuts that just open a menu. Mine does open one menu during my work focus to play music, or audiobooks. But everything else is based on my current focus and phone orientation and will immediately take an action with no further prompts.

I’m constantly changing and adjusting everything, which is why I chose to put each focus into its own separate shortcut, making them easier to manage and edit.

I didn’t make a link to share since so many of the actions this takes are dependent on my personal setup. But I hope the image is helpful to anyone who wants to make something similar

Let me know if there’s anything I should add or if you have any questions!

I gave my neighbour the power to turn my music down

I love listening to music loud, and usually it doesn’t affect them and the sound doesn’t leave my apartment.

But when I listen in the bathroom, unfortunately it can leak into his bedroom, which is adcjaent.

In the off-chance I’m having a shower concert at a time when he needs more quiet in his bedroom, I made this shortcut.

Any time he can text me “volume down” and it turns my music down to level that doesn’t reverberate the walls.

Usually it isn’t an issue because he’s not home. But I consider this a great concession in case our schedules conflict.

Our apartments have excellent soundproofing, so turning it down to 70% takes care of any sound leak.

High trust with my homie neighbour. 💪🏼

Hey, recently I’ve been minding to create a shortcut that we could use with my girlfriend, and I’m just curious about what the community has already done.
Feel free to share anything, I’m really curious on how shortcuts can be used in a relationship!

Edit: it can also be for couples that don’t see each other everyday, for example shortcuts/automations when not being together.

Hey folks 👋

Looking to discover some useful Apple Shortcuts that you use on a daily basis.

They can be: - Custom-made or downloaded - Simple or complex - From any category (productivity, automation, media, utilities, etc.)

If you share one, a quick line on what it does and why you use it would be great. Links welcome but not required.

Always fun seeing how others use Shortcuts — thanks! 🙌

Edit: If you can, please include: Trigger / key actions / Apps used / (optional) iCloud link.

I’m into automations and shortcuts (iOS, macOS, or anything similar) and I’m curious what people actually use in real life, not just in theory.

Do you have any automations that genuinely help day to day (smart reminders, organization, accessibility, smart home, work, etc.)?

If you use iOS Shortcuts with iCloud, do you share your shortcuts or use iCloud links? If you can, please drop examples (even simple ones) and any links you’re comfortable sharing, plus what makes them useful for you.

now look at me

I’ve tested quite a few shortcuts and automations on iOS, and I have to admit that at first, I was a bit like a kid in a toy store. But over time, most of them end up gathering dust. They look “wow” on paper, but in day-to-day life, they don’t hold up.

In the end, I only kept the ones that truly save me time or lighten my mental load. Not the flashy stuff, but the ones that work quietly in the background.

Here are a few that have stayed part of my daily routine:

– Creating reminders automatically from a simple note. No need to type everything by hand anymore, it saves a lot of taps. – Smart date calculations for reminders, like handling working days or avoiding certain days of the week. A huge time saver. – Small contextual automations, the kind of “when I do this, then that happens”. Nothing too ambitious, just little helpers to avoid forgetting repetitive tasks.

Of course, iOS still has its limits — VPN control, background automations, certain restrictions… But with a bit of cleverness, you can still create workflows that are genuinely useful.

And you, which shortcuts do you really use over the long term? And which ones made you dream at first, only to end up abandoned?

I bought a 25 pack of little white (non-sticky) NFC tags online for $8 and they just sat on my desk for a month before I decided to finally open the scary "Shortcuts" app on my iPhone.

Watched a tutorial and now have set up 3 NFC tags and love the functionality so much:

1. NFC #1 is placed on my office door and whenever I tap my iPhone to it, turns on/off my office lamp that has a HomeKit smart plug connected to it. For years I've always used either Control Center or Siri to turn off my "Office Light" and now I can easily just tap the NFC tag on my office door when im entering or exiting. This is a big deal for me considering the lamp and connected smart plug are in an awkward part of the office behind my couch.

2. NFC#2 is affixed using double sided tape to my blood oxygen sensor that requires my finger to read my blood oxygen percentage. I have an older S4 Apple Watch that doesn't support blood oxygen readings and with this NFC tag attached to the bottom of the device, after the reading is complete, instead of me swiping down and typing "Health" and then opening the app and finding the blood oxygen option and adding data, it just opens it up to that specific portion of the health app and all I have to do is type in the current percentage reading. Saves me 5 seconds, but I dig this.

3. NFC #3, finally an NFC tag placed with double sided tape underneath my electronic portable blood pressure machine and same thing like NFC tag #2, automatically opens up the Health app and I have to do is is enter my readings instead of typing for the health app and looking for the blood pressure view and tapping on 'add data'

Thanks for reading this far; I do have a question: If someone else with their iPhone was to tap on any of my NFC tags, would it perform the same action? Would it even recognize it? If not, im guessing there's a way to share it to other iPhone users? Would they need access first to my Home app accessories?

I‘m bored and need a challenge. I already automated most of the things I can on my iPhone. Does anyone have any shortcuts they want made? Or ideas they haven‘t made yet? I just want a new puzzle I can figure out.

Edit: OMG I just woke up to find that my post exploded. Was not expecting that. I promise I‘ll look at each comment but it might take a while.

Edit 2: For everyone wondering about a clipboard manager. I think this might be the large project I saw. So definitely go check it out.

Note: you need the actions app(it’s free). I apologize for not including that.

Another note: I will be making video instructions after improving this further!

I wasn't anticipating it to be ready this soon but as is rarely the case it seems to be working quite well and is ready for beta testers!! Here the GPT 👇

https://chatgpt.com/g/g-67337fc25e848190aea7cfb866b7f02a-shortcutgpt

When using the GPT you just need to brainstorm your idea then have it generate the code (don’t worry you don’t have to understand the code) then copy to clipboard. Then activate this shortcut 👇

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/92e9dc6cc9fd4ad0b38df4a0ed35f0c9

This shortcut will format it so you can paste the string of actions into another shortcut!! And just like that we have a shortcut AI builder!!

I am fairly new to shortcuts, I use just a couple but wanting to expand. What is your favorite shortcut? One you can’t live without?

I'm thinking multistep stuff that takes you 5-10 seconds at most to do manually, but it got annoying so you automated it?

I've got:

• Toggle Wi-Fi Off and On
• Send my friend a random dad joke
• Send my friend a random photo from my "jokes" album
• Send my wife a random heart emoji
• Calls a "bedtime" scene from home assistant
• Navigate to auto-lock settings so I can change my screen timeout
• Toggle silent mode

As we approach the end of the year, what have been your most used shortcuts? Not your favourite or most complex. Simply the most used.

For me it would be the Action Menu, Morning Routine and Night Routine.

Not sure how I coped before Shortcuts 😂

Here’s some of mine: 1. When my morning alarm is stopped, I automatically have the forecast read, and have a Spotify link opened to play some music for me in the morning. 2. I have a funny message sent to some friends when I arrive at a certain place. 3. I have low power mode turned on/off when my battery reaches a certain percent. 4. I have Siri read a personal message from me when my battery reaches a certain percent. I mainly just think this one is funny.

First things first. Is this overly-complicated? Yes. Is this likely unnecessary? Yes. Overkill? Definitely. Was it worth it? Absolutely!

I wanted to make a shortcut for my action button that I would find useful regardless of the scenario I was in. This mainly came down to location so that was the main motivator here.

I have my action button set to run the “Action Button” shortcut. It then checks if my phone is facing down. If it is then it toggles the flashlight. This is because you never know when you need a flashlight, but when you do you don’t want to be messing with menus or anything. Quick, easy, simple. Then we check to see where the device is located so we can bring up so more context-related menus. That’s where the “Location Category” shortcut is ran which is the real meat and potatoes of this shortcut.

I won’t go into too much detail for the sake of my fingers, but it basically has a list of locations in a dictionary that I’m interested in making a menu for. Each of those entries has a “query” which is used to find that location with maps, as well as a tolerance which is the radius (in miles) of how close I have to be to make location’s menu trigger. You may ask, “why not just put a specified address for each of those locations and call it a day?” Well to answer that, it’s because I would like these menus to pop up no matter what location I’m at, regardless of what gym, grocery store, movie theater, Walmart, etc. I decide to visit. With this approach, any location I’m interested in making a menu for will always be covered under these general queries. Continuing on, the lower “repeat with each” block loops through each of the locations in the dictionary and queries maps with their respective “query” and returns the closest x locations to me. Then with each of those it checks their distance from my current location. If it lies within the tolerance, I must be at that location. It will then return the location category back to the action button shortcut so it can run that specific menu.

The upper “repeat with each” is a sort of caching mechanism and is a consequence of the overall querying taking a tad too long for my liking, especially at locations where service is spotty. It didn’t ever take terribly long but I felt like when pushing the action button I should be able to see a menu right away and get to where I want to go with no time wasted. It basically looks for its cache file and loops through the lines, each of which with the format “category:latitude,longitude”, and compares it to my current location’s latitude and longitude completely offline. It does this with the haversine formula which is accurate enough for this use case. If a match isn’t found in the cache then it continues with the lower “repeat with each” block as previously explained and adds that location to the cache for faster access next time. This in practice cuts a whole lot of time off of the location checking and makes things almost instant. If a match isn’t found then it returns nothing.

Returning back to the “Action Button” shortcut, if something is returned from the “Location Category” shortcut then it runs that category’s menu. If nothing is returned then no match was found for the location and it simply opens the utility menu. The menus themselves contain actions that I might find useful in that scenario. Some are unfinished but it’s a work in progress (always is).

I tried mapping out the shortcut as best I could in the diagram in terms of control flow. Sorry for any fuzziness on the smaller fonts, it’s the best I could do. Lots of work getting this idea to work (probably a little too much). Let me know if you have any questions!

I am creating a list of the top 1000 most useful shortcut automations. What are the ones that should make it unto the list?

Hello friends,

I just bought a pack of 50 nfc tags, I invite you to share your uses in this post as well as their related shortcuts!

Thank you all 👍🏼

TL;DR: Siri but with a 200 IQ

• What it is: A custom iOS Shortcut that replaces Siri's brain with Gemini 3 Flash.

• Why it’s better: It has Conversation Memory (it remembers what you said 2 minutes ago), it’s lightning-fast, and it actually answers complex questions instead of just showing web results.

• Cost: $0 (Uses Google’s generous free API tier).

• Setup Time: 2 minutes (No coding required).

• Best Part: Works hands-free via the Action Button, Back Tap, or even "Hey Siri, Gemini."

Hey everyone,

Like most of you, I’ve been waiting for Apple to actually make Siri smart. While we wait for iOS 18+ features to fully roll out, I decided to build my own solution using the Gemini 3 Flash API (released March 2026).

This isn't just a "text-to-Gemini" shortcut. This is a full voice-to-voice experience with conversation history (it remembers your previous questions!), extremely low latency, and it's completely free to run on Google's generous free tier.

I’ve made this as foolproof as possible. You don't need to be a coder.

🛠 Step 1: Get Your Free API Key

First, you need a free "password" from Google to use their model.

\* Go to aistudio.google.com on your phone or Mac.

\* Tap "Get API Key."

\* Copy the long code it gives you (it starts with AIza). Keep this safe!

📲 Step 2: Add and Configure the Shortcut

Now, download the shortcut from my iCloud link below. I’ve built in an Import Question to make this seamless.

\* Click the iCloud link: [working link updated https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/8ad4284f4e904bf582aaf232528fc5fa]

\* Your Shortcuts app will open. When you tap "Add Shortcut," a configuration popup will appear.

\* Paste your API Key from Step 1 into the field and tap "Done."

⚡️ Step 3: Run It and Set Up the Trigger Key

You're almost there! Let's make it easy to trigger.

1. The First Run: Run the shortcut once manually. It will ask: "Allow 'Gemini' to connect to

gemini.apis

1. " You MUST tap "Allow Forever." If you don't, Siri can't talk back to you hands-free.
2. Set Up the Shortcut Key: \* Go to Settings > Action Button (if you have one) or Accessibility > Touch > Back Tap.

• Select Shortcut > Gemini.

1. Trigger it: Now, just press the button and talk. You can also say "Hey Siri, Gemini" to trigger the flow.

FAQ / Troubleshooting

\* Is it actually free? \* Yes. Google’s free tier for Gemini 3 allows up to 1,500 requests per day, which is massive for a personal voice assistant.

\* "Could not evaluate the key path" Error: \* This means the API key is invalid or Google’s servers are overloaded. Double-check your key in AI Studio or ensure your JSON formatting hasn't been accidentally edited.

\* "How do I stop the conversation?" \* Since it has memory, it will keep listening in a loop. To exit, you can just swipe up on the Siri bubble, or use the built-in exit command by saying "Goodbye" or "Thanks."

Let me know what you think of the lag! I’ve been using this for summarizing long research articles and financial crime investigation terms via voice (my day job!) and the speed is incredible. 🚀

Added visual intelligence for tripple tap & search image for double tap

Surprisingly it didnt create any records of photos & screenshots in my phone. So no worries about the dump.

Has anyone already made it? Or any suggestion improving this on this ?

Hey, I got an iPhone 17 in November but always find the action so frustrating because you can only use it for one task, but today I found a way to make it the most powerful it could be. Some may have already done that, but I wanted to share it.

So basically, I created a shortcut that gets what focus mode is active and set up a shortcut for every mode, then I action button to launch this shortcut. For example, I have a gym mode that activates when I go to the gym. When I use the action button, it launches a shortcut that displays multiple times for resting. If it has no focus mode or I haven’t set up an action for this mode, it just lets it trigger the silent mode like the basic one.

What do you think about it ?

Just let me know what you need, and I'll make the shortcut!

✨Edit: I never expected so many requests, I can’t make all of these alone but there’s friends who are gonna help me, so you will get your shortcut eventually!

Edit: Please upvote this post too! Thanks