[HN Gopher] Apple Shortcuts is falling into "the automation gap"
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Apple Shortcuts is falling into "the automation gap"
Author : walterbell
Score : 85 points
Date : 2025-05-05 06:40 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sixcolors.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (sixcolors.com)
| rcarmo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| _> Someone put a lot of effort into designing that system._
|
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| mleo wrote:
| 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.
| nunez wrote:
| You can create separate HK bridges for groups of devices
| to prevent _everything_ from showing up.
| hoseyor wrote:
| 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.
| bredren wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| qsort wrote:
| 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...
| walterbell wrote:
| Shortcuts can send data to OpenAI or other LLMs,
| https://www.innoq.com/en/blog/2023/03/openai-gpt-on-macos-
| io...
| savolai wrote:
| Converting pdfs scanned with the builtin Files document
| scanner to jpegs or pngs has been the most helpful so far
| SebFender wrote:
| I use it daily to turn my iOS device to low power when I use
| a photo and video app - this little trick turns off HDR that
| I profoundly detest and can't visually stand for.
| Nab443 wrote:
| Makes me think of this old trick that raise the room
| temperature when you press space long enough.
| Obscurity4340 wrote:
| Why not use it to automate turning low power back on any
| time it gets turned off?
| microflash wrote:
| It is for me. Apparently you can't turn on Wifi Hotspot on a
| single tap on iOS, or switch off Bluetooth or Wifi completely
| on iOS so a few shortcuts to do these in control center it
| is.
| dev0p wrote:
| 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.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| You shouldn't have to make any promises to a corporation about
| what you will and won't do with a device that you purchase from
| them, including what software you wish to run.
| omneity wrote:
| True in principle. Looking at it from Apple's side, they are
| selling an ecosystem of clients to digital (or physical)
| service providers with certain guarantees on how that
| ecosystem operates.
|
| Opening up automation is a double whammy for Apple:
|
| - More savvy users are able to solve more of their problems
| themselves, reducing the LTV of their potentially most
| engaged clients who might buy less on the App Store as a
| result
|
| - Some guarantees of the ecosystem crumble (banking apps
| don't know anymore if it is really you who initiated that
| transaction, ID verification apps don't know if that camera
| stream is really from your device, and plenty other things
| devs suddenly have to worry about)
|
| As a final nail in the coffin, it also means that the
| networks that Apple sells to its _users_ are less reliable or
| have less guarantees as a result - you don't know if the text
| you received was really sent now or scheduled in advance etc.
|
| Of course a lot of these rules are not justified, user
| hostile or plain non-sensical, but what I'm trying to say is
| that from Apple's perspective the consideration is not just
| "user owns device" but a lot of interplaying dynamics that do
| not seem to be in favor of empowering users.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| All of these things are beneficial to various corporations
| attempting to financially exploit me, but not necessarily
| beneficial to me, the owner and operator of the device.
| bayindirh wrote:
| This is also why CLI tools are second class citizens in the
| very same ecosystem.
| the_snooze wrote:
| >But why is Apple so goddamn afraid that if I get to do what I
| want, something terrible will happen?
|
| I feel like this is the general business ethos of modern
| consumer-facing tech. They don't want to sell tools that serve
| you. They want to sell a service to chew your food for you as
| you accept whatever mush they feed you.
| alex1115alex wrote:
| The hotspot settings are particularly barren. You can turn the
| hotspot on/off, change the password... and... that's it. They
| can't be used for anything useful, like detecting when a device
| connects/disconnects. I'm not sure why they added Shortcuts in
| this state.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Shortcuts fails for programmer and for non-programmers. This is
| the result where you don't know your audience
| dawnerd wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Simple stuff, like compressing a pdf.
|
| I couldn't figure out how to do it using tasker.
| doix wrote:
| 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....
|
| [1] https://server47.de/automation/
| stavros wrote:
| 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.
| frabcus wrote:
| Yep - I switched from iPhone to Android and Tasker is much
| more powerful. Slightly less good UX and mainly systems
| focussed. But actually allows any trigger.
|
| Also extensible - it can trigger scripts in Termux. You can
| install any command line open source tool inside Termux and
| trigger it on tasks.
|
| eg When my home radiator thermostat stopped supporting IFTTT,
| I made a Python script to call their API and trigger it with
| Tasker. Works flawlessly.
|
| https://www.flourish.org/2023/11/netatmo-smart-thermostat-
| ho...
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| How do you compress a pdf with tasker ? It's like the basic
| 101 of productivity.
|
| Shortcut on iOS is like 2 step.
|
| Step1: export pdf to images and choose dpi (lowest for
| maximum compression).
|
| Step2: make a pdf of previous images.
|
| I couldn't figure out how to compress pdf on tasker without
| using some convulated third party addon.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Interesting, I can't remember wanting to make a PDF on my
| phone for a long time. I certainly do on the desktop
| often enough, but it doesn't seem like an everyday action
| for most people?
| nunez wrote:
| It's equivalent on the surface, but it's vastly more
| complicated to use and has many more failure modes due to
| different phone models, root vs non-root actions, and more.
| It's definitely a power user tool, whereas non-technical
| users can create shortcuts with Shortcuts much more easily.
|
| I experimented with the idea of going back to Android. Having
| to recreate all of my shortcuts in Tasker was one non-
| starter. (It not having a HomeKit equivalent was the other.
| Google Home is much more limited.)
|
| Shortcuts can also sync between Apple devices via iCloud
| (though Automations in Shortcuts don't; another thing that
| drives me mad about the app), and they more-or-less work
| regardless of where they're running.
| GoToRO wrote:
| You're joking, right? First off, a lot of things that you have
| to automate on an iPhone is just native UI in Android. For
| example, add a shortcut to a picture on your home screen. It's
| native in Android. Just long tap the file in the Files app and
| Add to Home.
|
| Then there is the Modes and Routines app that allows you to do
| anything.
|
| On iPhone, to add a shortcut to a picture, the Shortcut app
| asks me to give it the filename! Of course they hide the
| filename everywhere they can because apple. They could provide
| a browse like experience but no, type in the filename! How am I
| supposed to find the filename if you hide it from me?
| jfernandezr wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| iOS 18 shortcuts can be added to control center,
| 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-io...
|
| For local actions, app-specific URL schemes can be driven from
| shortcuts, 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| _> 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Is there any reason people won't just use the MCP server
| without an LLM?
| meindnoch wrote:
| T-that's illegal!
| larvaetron wrote:
| > 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.
|
| That reminds me of an announcement maybe about a year(?) ago,
| when people on the internet were making a huge deal out of
| ChatGPT integrating with Wolfram Alpha like it was this game
| changer, and I just remember thinking... we already had this
| with Siri over a decade ago, with no LLM middleman necessary,
| until Apple decided to kill it and start integrating their
| "machine learning" into all their products around mid 2010s.
| jen20 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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-...
|
| Overall, Shortcuts feels like a nice polished app, but it's
| definitely severely lacking compared to Automator.
| xeonmc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| macOS has this behind 3 clicks: Action Center > Display (the
| bar above the brightness) > button just like on iOS appears.
| nunez wrote:
| Automatic dark mode doesn't work when you have Night Shift on
| outside of night-time hours. I've had to write a similar
| shortcut and automation to work around this.
| mrtksn wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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).
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