Stop Tapping: Automate Your iPhone with Shortcuts
A practical guide to building iPhone automations with Shortcuts — from morning routines to focus modes, no coding required.
Every morning I do the same five things on my phone. Turn off Do Not Disturb. Crank brightness up. Open Weather. Start a playlist. Text my team I'm online.
That's about 40 taps. Every single day. I build apps for a living and I was still doing this manually for two years before I got embarrassed enough to fix it.
iPhone Shortcuts can handle all of it. But most people open the app once, feel confused, and close it. This guide skips the confusion.
What Shortcuts Actually Is
Shortcuts is Apple's automation app. It lets you chain together actions — things your apps and phone can do — and run them all at once. One tap. Or zero taps, if you set a trigger.
Think of it like a recipe. You define ingredients (apps, settings, data) and steps. iPhone follows the recipe whenever you say so.
There are two types. Shortcuts you run manually — tap a button, done. Automations run on their own — when you arrive somewhere, at a certain time, when you connect to Wi-Fi.
Automations are where the magic is. But most guides start with complex stuff and lose people immediately. We're starting with something you can finish in three minutes.
Step 1: Build Your First Shortcut in 3 Minutes
Open the Shortcuts app. Tap the + button in the top right. Tap Add Action. Search for "Set Volume." Add it. Set the volume to something you actually want.
Now tap Add Action again. Search "Set Brightness." Add it. Set your preferred brightness. Tap the name at the top and rename it "Morning Setup."
That's a real shortcut. Tap the play button to test it. Your volume and brightness just changed. You built that.
Step 2: Set Up Your First Automation
A manual shortcut is convenient. An automation is invisible — your phone just handles things without you touching it.
Open Shortcuts. Tap Automation at the bottom. Tap +. You'll see a list of triggers. Here are the most useful ones:
- Time of Day — run something at 7am every weekday
- Arrive/Leave — run something when you get to work or home
- Charger Connected — run something when you plug in
- App Opened — run something when you open a specific app
- Wi-Fi Connected — run something when you join a specific network
Let's make a charger automation. Tap Charger → Is Connected. Now add actions: Set Low Power Mode to off, Set Brightness to 80%, play your focus playlist. Tap Done.
Your phone now does all that automatically every time you plug in. You didn't write any code. You just described what you wanted.
"The best automation is the one you forget you set up. It just quietly handles things in the background."
Step 3: The 5 Automations Worth Setting Up Today
I've been collecting these for two years. These are the five I actually kept running.
Morning Alarm Dismiss
Trigger: Time of Day (set to your alarm time, weekdays only). Actions: Turn off Do Not Disturb, set brightness to 60%, open your weather app. The phone wakes up before you finish rubbing your eyes.
Arrive at Work
Trigger: Arrive (set your work location). Actions: Connect to work Wi-Fi focus, turn off personal notifications, set a "Work" Focus mode. You never have to manually switch modes again.
Headphones Connected
Trigger: Bluetooth device connected (pick your AirPods or earbuds). Actions: Set volume to your preferred level, open Spotify or Apple Music, start your last playlist. This one saves me 20 seconds every single time.
Bedtime
Trigger: Time of Day (30 minutes before sleep). Actions: Turn on Do Not Disturb, dim brightness to 20%, turn on Night Shift. You don't have to remember to do any of this.
Low Battery Warning
Trigger: Battery Level drops below 20%. Actions: Turn on Low Power Mode, send yourself a notification with the nearest charging spot (if you set it up). No more surprise shutdowns.
Step 4: Where Shortcuts Gets Frustrating (And How to Fix It)
The built-in app has a real discovery problem. You have to know what actions exist to use them. The search works, but only if you know what to search for.
The other issue is that some automations require confirmation. iOS asks "Do you want to run this?" before executing. That kills the whole point of an automation.
To turn off the confirmation: when building an automation, toggle off Ask Before Running. It's at the bottom of the setup screen. This is hidden and confusing and I don't know why Apple doesn't make it more obvious.
The third issue: you can't organize shortcuts well. Once you have 20+, it becomes a mess. That's where third-party apps come in.
Step 5: The Apps That Make Shortcuts Actually Usable
I tested six apps over three months. These four are the ones I'd actually recommend.
This is the app I wish Apple had built. It has a library of thousands of pre-made shortcuts sorted by category — morning routines, travel, fitness, developer tools. You install one in two taps. The organization features let you group shortcuts into folders, and the home screen widgets are actually good. The free version gives you enough to evaluate it properly. Pro is worth it if you go past 20 shortcuts.
- Massive library of pre-built shortcuts
- Clean folder organization
- Solid home screen widgets
- Syncs across devices
- Monthly pricing feels steep for what it is
- Some pre-built shortcuts are outdated
- No way to edit shortcuts inside the app
Launcher is about getting to shortcuts faster, not building better ones. It puts a row of app icons and shortcut buttons in your notification center. Swipe down, tap. It also creates Lock Screen and home screen widgets that are sharper than Apple's native ones. If your main friction is that shortcuts are buried, Launcher fixes that. I use it as a "quick launch bar" for my top 6 automations.
This one is for people who aren't afraid of a bit of JavaScript. Scriptable lets you write actual scripts that Shortcuts can call. Want to pull live data from an API, format it, and send yourself a notification? Shortcuts alone can't do that cleanly. Scriptable can. I use it to check my App Store stats every morning and push a summary to my notification center. The learning curve is real, but the community has hundreds of ready-to-use scripts on GitHub.
Actions adds over 100 new actions to your Shortcuts library. Things Apple didn't include — advanced text manipulation, device info, random generators, color tools. It's not an app you open, it's an extension you install. After that, new actions just appear in Shortcuts. Completely free. No subscription. The developer clearly built this because they needed these tools themselves. I respect that.
App Comparison
Here's how they stack up side by side.
| Feature | Toolbox | Launcher | Scriptable | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pre-built shortcuts library | Yes (1,000+) | No | Community only | No |
| Home screen widgets | Yes | Yes (best) | Yes (custom) | No |
| Adds new actions to Shortcuts | No | No | Yes (via scripts) | Yes (100+) |
| Requires coding knowledge | No | No | Yes (JavaScript) | No |
| Pricing | $4.99/mo or $29.99/yr | $7.99/yr | Free | Free |
| Best for | Beginners wanting quick wins | Speed of access | Power users | Anyone building shortcuts |
My honest recommendation: install Actions first (free, no downside) and Launcher if you want your shortcuts accessible instantly. Try Toolbox free tier to see if the library is useful for you. Only touch Scriptable if you're comfortable with code.
The Automations I Actually Use Daily
I've tried maybe 40 different automations over two years. Most were clever but useless. Here's what survived.
The One That Saved the Most Time
When I open Maps, Shortcuts automatically sets my destination to work or home depending on the time of day. Before 2pm it assumes work. After 5pm it assumes home. This used to take me 30 seconds every time I opened Maps. Now it just knows.
The One That Improved My Sleep
At 10pm: Night Shift on, True Tone off, brightness to 15%, DND on, Wi-Fi on (for charging), Bluetooth off (AirPods don't need to stay connected while I sleep). My phone goes into sleep mode automatically. I stopped thinking about it.
The Developer One (Slightly Geeky)
Using Scriptable, I have a morning widget that pulls my app's crash rate and daily revenue via API and shows it on my lock screen. I glance at my phone when I wake up and immediately know if anything broke overnight. Took me two hours to set up. Has saved me from multiple "why didn't you respond faster" conversations with myself.
"The goal isn't to automate everything. It's to automate the specific things that annoy you every single day. Start there."
Common Mistakes People Make
Three things I see beginners do that make Shortcuts feel broken.
Leaving confirmation prompts on. The automation runs but asks "are you sure?" every time. That's not automation, that's just adding a step. Turn off "Ask Before Running" in every automation you build.
Building too many automations at once. You get excited, set up 15 automations in a day. Then they start conflicting. Your phone behaves strangely and you don't know which automation did it. Add one at a time, test it for two days, then add the next.
Using location triggers for everything. Arrive/Leave automations are convenient but they run location checks in the background constantly. Battery takes a hit. Use time-based triggers for predictable schedules. Save location triggers for things that genuinely need location, like automatically texting your partner when you leave work.
The Practical Summary
You don't need to become a Shortcuts power user. You need three things: a morning automation, an evening automation, and one trigger based on something you do every day (plug in your phone, connect headphones, open a specific app).
That's it. Those three automations will save you time every single day. Everything else is optional.
Install Actions right now — free, extends what you can do. Use Launcher if you want fast access. Skip subscriptions until you've built at least five automations and know you'll keep using them.
Start with one shortcut today. Literally today. Open the app, build the morning setup I described in Step 1, add it to your home screen. That's ten minutes. Do it before you close this tab.
FAQ
Do Shortcuts automations drain battery?
Time-based ones barely register. Location-based ones do use more battery because your phone checks your location in the background. If battery life matters to you, prefer time triggers. If you use location triggers, keep it to two or three max.
My automation ran once and then stopped working. Why?
Most likely cause: iOS updated and reset the permission. Open the automation, check that "Ask Before Running" is still off, and re-save. Second most likely: the trigger conditions changed. Check that your location is set correctly or that the time zone didn't shift after travel.
Can Shortcuts work with Android apps or cross-platform tools?
No. Shortcuts is iPhone and iPad only. It can trigger actions in apps that have Shortcuts support (most major apps do), but it can't control Android or talk to apps that haven't added Shortcuts integration. For cross-platform automation, look at Zapier or Make — different tools, different scope.
Is Toolbox for Shortcuts worth paying for?
Depends on how you use it. The free tier is genuinely useful — you get access to a large chunk of the library and basic organization. If you find yourself browsing it daily and want the full library plus sync across devices, the annual plan at $29.99 is reasonable. Monthly at $4.99 is only worth it if you're actively building a lot of shortcuts in a short period. I'd start free, use it for a month, then decide.