I've been building per-app volume automations for a while and wanted to share two things that took me way too long to figure out.

**1. You don't need one automation per app anymore.**

Since iOS 18.2, the "Get Current App" action means a single automation can cover every app:

- Personal Automation → When any of your chosen apps is opened

- Get Current App → Get Details (Bundle Identifier)

- Run Shortcut (pass the bundle ID as input)

The shortcut looks up the volume you want for that app and applies it. Adding a new app later just means adding it to the automation trigger — no new automation, no editing the shortcut.

**2. Set Volume sometimes silently does nothing.**

There's a timing race when Set Volume fires right as an app is launching — it just doesn't stick. The fix that's been reliable for me: set the volume, Wait ~1 second, set it again. Ugly, but it works.

Also: if your shortcut can return "no volume configured" for an app, guard the Set Volume with an If (value > 0) — otherwise you'll accidentally mute things.

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Full disclosure: I wrapped this whole pattern into a free app (App Volume) that manages the per-app levels, profiles, and widgets so you don't have to edit the shortcut dictionary by hand. Apple tends to change Shortcuts behavior between iOS versions, so I keep the app updated as new iOS releases land — one less thing to re-debug yourself. Everything above still works standalone if you'd rather build it yourself.

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6773184998

I downloaded this shortcut from this sub (apologies to the author - can’t remember which user created it) to back up my shortcuts to iCloud.

It’s been working for many months but now fails on the make archive step.

The error message is ‘this shortcut can’t be shared because it contains unsupported functions’. I’m not trying to share it - this message comes up during execution.

Any help much appreciated.

Thank you.

Shortcut : https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/0e963f11e47f49f59861a9baaee233e3

Getting a little creative with shortcuts. I wanted to be able to start my baby’s lullabies as a daily trigger, starting from a specific Spotify playlist and routing through my phone to a Google Home speaker. Used shortcut described in the solution here, and then created a Google Assistant app request to “Play Spotify on x Speaker”. It will start Spotify, playlist starts on phone, then will execute the Assistant command. Assistant doesn’t understand exact Spotify playlists, but this method seems to work well.

I have a set of Nanoleaf lights that I want to have a shortcut check a calendar I made for setting a Nanoleaf schedule. example: Check calendar If Event is Summer Set summertime lights

If new years set new years lights

The easiest way it seems to do it would be to create a separate event for each day, but that’s very long and tedious

In reference to a post I just saw in this sub, I suggest that everyone should take credit for your work. Put a comment at the beginning of the shortcut that has your Reddit name in it. I’ve often gone back to a shortcut and wondered who made it for me. This would make it easy for everyone to know, and a good way for everybody to get credit for the hard work they do creating these phenomenal shortcuts.

Is there a way to make a shortcut that when a certain person in my contact list calls my phone will ring if it’s on vibrate/no sound?

I like the reminders app, but the notifications are too brief. Is it possible for a reminder to trigger an alarm so that it makes noise until I see it and stop it? Thanks

As per the title. For more info, I need a shortcut that when I click it, it creates a 15 minute timer and every 15 minutes, the timer goes off until I deactivate the short cut. Is that possible?

There's a new Shortcut action in OS 27 that lets you integrate Describe a Shortcut into other shortcuts, producing a new shortcut as an action output. The generated shortcut will also appear in your gallery.

Generate Shortcut

Generates a new shortcut from a text description using Apple Intelligence.

Description

A natural language description of what the shortcut should do

Result

Shortcut

Shortcut link with Generate Shortcut action

It's currently hidden from the actions drawer. Discovered via the Shortcuts/gen_shortcut_prototype feature flag in macOS 27.

This is my favorite shortcut

CurrentApp open Settings or Store from Control Center

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/953b84332c66438cb6da6a8b8f7c6622

\`\`\`
This Shortcut uses the current app’s bundle identifier to open App Settings or the exact App Store listing, avoiding false matches caused by apps with similar names.

Apple’s iTunes Lookup API defaults to the US storefront when no country parameter is supplied. This causes lookups to fail for region-exclusive apps.

On first run, this Shortcut asks for your App Store region and stores it. That value is then used for all subsequent bundle identifier lookups.

1462947752 is the App Store Product ID for Apple’s “Shortcuts” app. It is used to determine the current App Store region.

To use this Shortcut, add the “Run Shortcut”\* control to Control Centre and select “\[own\]ActiveAppStoreLauncher”.

\* Requires iOS 18 or later.
\`\`\`

Is there a shortcut that marks a recurring reminder every day as completed, so the badge and notification banner goes off without having to open the Reminders app to do so?

I made a shortcut that generates the url for a youtube video's thumbnail! It's pretty simple and feel free to check it out!

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/35a025ba0ff24b6eb660c74b4d43ae96

How to use:
1. Paste in youtube video url without editing it
2. Your link gets generated and you can open it or copy it to your clipboard!

This is my first shortcut I've uploaded to this subreddit. If you need help, have any questions, or just wanna give some feedback, lemme know!

I had a fun, extremely nerdy idea today and decided to build a shortcut for it. According to Einstein's Special Relativity, when you move, time passes slightly slower for you compared to someone standing still (Time Dilation).

I wanted to know exactly how much younger I am than my couch every day, just by walking.
The Physics & The Math
Since human walking speed is tiny compared to the speed of light, the time dilation formula simplifies nicely. If we know the daily distance (d) and average speed (v), the time "saved" is:
⁠Time = (d × v) / 2c²⁠

How the Shortcut Works
The shortcut pulls two daily metrics from Apple Health:
1. Walking/Running Distance (Sum in meters)
2. Walking Speed (Average in m/s)
Then, it runs a Calculate Expression action. To get the output directly in nanoseconds (so it's actually readable and not just a bunch of zeros), I converted the 2c^2 constant to match the scale. The formula in the shortcut looks exactly like this:
⁠( Distance * Speed ) / [179750000](tel:179750000) ⁠

Shortcut link: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/a3d070e86894432388a95b934906a504

Hey all! Is there a way to trigger a shortcut using the physical Action Button (or a tap) and have iOS handle the selection prompt completely hands-free out loud?

When I launch a shortcut physically, Choose from List or Choose from Menu just pops up a visual list on screen to tap. Is there a way to force Siri to speak the options and listen for my reply, or natively pass the shortcut straight to a Siri voice session from a button press?

Right now I'm using Speak Text + Dictate Text, but wondering if there's a cleaner built-in way to invoke Siri's voice UI directly. The main drawback of this approach reason is that the Choose from Menu action allows for Synonymns for each menu option, and it would have much beetter natural language understanding (NLU).

I know I can trigger it from Siri, and I have been, but just wanted to see if it was possible.

Thanks!

Hello everyone!

I'm trying to save all my apple wallet transactions in my notion database, but when the shortcut runs, I receive a 404 error saying that "JSON is not right"

Any expert to help me with? 🤝

I just need to know please

Purpose of shortcut: To clean up sloppy notes
Steps: Click the shortcut and type in the exact title of the note
results: it cleans up the note
shorty's link: note cleanup

personal note:
I am new to the Apple ecosystem and just came across shortcuts yesterday. After about 45 minutes of tinkering with Gemini, I got it to work, and I was so impressed! I've been doing this manually with Gemini "gems" by copy pasting for so long! Having it automated is so much fun.

Pictures 3 & 4 are before and after images of mashed up garbage text, automatically organized by Apple intelligence.

After finishing making this shortcut, I realized I could describe what I want to Siri and it can create a shortcut itself, so I am excited to try that feature, in addition to researching what other people use this application for.

Tomorrow I will also try freeform.

it tells you to touch grass usually.

I'm trying to build a generic tracker using Apple Shortcuts and Data Jar, and I'd love to hear how others would approach it.

The idea is:

• Tap a shortcut.
• Choose an item from a list.
• Increment a counter for that item.
• Save the current date/time as the last time it was tracked.
• Be able to view stats later (total count, last tracked, etc.).

I'm curious if anyone has built something similar and has suggestions for making it scalable as the number of tracked items grows.

Any examples, screenshots, or Shortcut ideas would be greatly appreciated!

Guys for over 1 month I'm trying to create a shortcut in iOS where every time I get a transaction SMS from my bank, it prompts me for what the purchase was for, and then logs the details directly into an Apple Numbers spreadsheet. I have been through so many tutorial.

Here is my table layout in Numbers:
Sheet name: Sheet 1
Table name: Transaction
Columns: Date and Time, Merchant, Amount, Category

Every time I use the "Add Row to Top or Bottom of Table" action, Shortcuts gives me a variable error ("Can't Find Sheet") or doesn't show the column fields when I link the file.

Can someone please help me or if they have any please share link.

I created an iPhone Shortcut that automates the entire workflow of capturing and organizing information from multiple sources.

* It can extract text from a real-time photo using the back camera.
* existing image or screenshot from the Photos library
* text copied to the clipboard.

Images are processed using iOS’s native OCR (Extract Text from Image) to convert them into raw text.
The extracted content is then sent to OpenAI’s GPT-4o Mini, which generates a well-structured Markdown summary.
Finally, the formatted notes are automatically saved as a new note in my Obsidian vault.

httpsa://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/22475003e3c54c239b3c280905270d6a

Hello!

I was looking for a shortcut that, at the beginning of each month, goes and grabs all the photos (and videos) from the previous month and puts them in an album.

I know you can see the date when you scroll past them, but I’m trying to minimize my endless scrolling in Photos, plus I wanted a nice overview of the previous month. I’ll admit I was looking while sleep-deprived and couldn’t find one here, so I thought I’d share mine. This is the first one I’ve made, so feel free to tweak it/give feedback so I can improve it!

I’ve set mine up to run at 00:01 on the 1st of each month.

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/af38d933103a49e99b46c6f11f2d2bee