So iOS 12 landed last Tuesday and I finally had a free weekend to actually mess with the Shortcuts app instead of just installing it and forgetting it exists, which is what I did with basically every "new Apple feature" for the last three iOS cycles. Screen Time got all the headlines this week (fair, it's the thing that'll actually change how people use their phones), but Shortcuts is the one I've been poking at since Saturday morning with coffee in hand.
Quick context if you missed the Workflow acquisition drama back in 2017: Apple bought a genuinely great little automation app called Workflow, sat on it for over a year, and this week it finally resurfaced baked into iOS as "Shortcuts," with Siri bolted on. You can chain a bunch of actions together — grab your location, text it to someone, open an app, whatever — and then either tap the shortcut manually or say a custom phrase to Siri and have her run the whole thing.
What I actually built
Nothing impressive, honestly. First one: "Heading Out," which texts my wife "leaving now, ETA 20 min" and turns on Do Not Disturb, triggered by saying "Hey Siri, heading out." Took maybe four minutes to set up and it's already the shortcut I use the most, mostly because it saves me from typing while I'm juggling car keys and a coffee mug.
Second one is dumber but I like it more: a "Parking Spot" shortcut that drops a pin at my current location and saves a photo, so when I inevitably forget where I parked at the mall I can just open it in Maps instead of wandering around pressing my key fob like an idiot hoping to hear the horn. I built this after literally doing that exact wandering-around thing two weekends ago, so this is very much a shortcut born out of personal humiliation.
Third one automates something genuinely small: opening Notes to a specific "Groceries" note and turning my phone to silent, triggered by "Hey Siri, grocery mode." That's it. That's the whole shortcut. And yet I use it every single Sunday now.
The annoying parts
Siri's invocation phrases are pickier than they should be. I tried naming one shortcut "Good Morning" and Siri kept hearing "good morning" as the actual greeting and just replying to me instead of running the automation. I had to rename it to something weirder ("Morning Routine Go") before it reliably triggered. Nobody warns you about this in any of the Apple marketing copy, you just have to find out the hard way at 7am while half asleep.
Also, sharing shortcuts with normal humans is a mess right now. I tried sending my "Heading Out" shortcut to a friend as a link and he had no idea what he was looking at, got a permissions warning that sounded vaguely alarming, and just didn't install it. Can't blame him. The whole flow feels like it was designed by people who already understood what a shortcut was, not for the person receiving one cold.
One more thing while I'm complaining: this is exactly the kind of app that's going to get buried under a folder named "Utilities" on everyone's third home screen page within a month, and that's a shame, because it's actually more useful day to day than most of what Apple announced on stage two weeks ago.
Speaking of the stage announcements: the new phones went on sale yesterday. I didn't go stand in a line for an XS Max, I'm still on a 7 and honestly kind of happy about it, the battery life on this thing is still fine and I don't feel like paying north of a thousand bucks to get a slightly better camera and a notch I'd have to stare at for two years. Maybe next cycle. Maybe not. iOS 12 running smooth on three-year-old hardware is doing a lot of the convincing-me-not-to-upgrade work here, if I'm being honest.
If you've got iOS 12 installed already, open Shortcuts, hit the gallery tab, and just start building something dumb and specific to your own life. That's where the actual value is, not in the flashy demo ones Apple shows on stage.