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Apple iOS 13.1 Personal automation via Shortcuts

support.apple.com

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Re: Apple iOS 13.1 Personal automation via Shortcuts

#51

Post by mikestew »

hart_russell wrote: post #48

The iPhone Xs was my first ever iPhone. Before that I had been an Android power user for 8 years. I installed my own custom ROMs, xposed framework, rooted, etc. Although I'm firmly in the iPhone camp for privacy and other reasons now, I miss the automation provided by Tasker and the Android OS. I used to have many useful location + time based profiles. For instance, I had a profile for if I was at home and it was bet…

Sooooo...a quick skim of the article indicates that personal automations can now do what you're missing. My question is, are you complaining about something that this article specifically addresses, saying "yea! About time!", or...? Because your "point is" is specifically addressed by TFA.

Re: Apple iOS 13.1 Personal automation via Shortcuts

#52

Post by gen3 »

crazygringo wrote: post #3

Has anyone found any of these useful? I'm racking my brain for something that would benefit me, but nothing comes to mind... but I feel like I'm just lacking creativity here.

I spent the other night writing a cowsay shortcut, so that’s something.

Re: Apple iOS 13.1 Personal automation via Shortcuts

#53

Post by mikestew »

TechRemarker wrote: post #8

So exciting. When Shortcuts was first announced I was thrilled since I could think of hundreds of flows that would be amazing for my daily life to simplify things. But quickly realized there were many limitations such as it couldn't be run automatically at a set time, and nearly every flow I wanted it was missing a few actions to make them fully possible. As such I used a couple but overall didn't use it at all. With…

I think personal automation is what will finally make Shortcuts useful. Like you, I've got a ton of flows that could benefit, but without triggers a lot of the shortcuts were just saving me a few button presses. To me, that's just not worth cluttering the Shortcuts UI and having one more thing to maintain.

As you point out, there's unmet potential. So many times I go to create a shortcut, "surely they have an action for $FOO, it would be one of the first things I'd implement", and...no. But it's getting there. Maybe not this year, but I hold hope that Apple will keep at it and in the next year or two this feature will start to open up.

Re: Apple iOS 13.1 Personal automation via Shortcuts

#54

Post by pfortuny »

kenips wrote: post #42

I was hoping that I can finally change night shift intensity based on time of day. Unfortunately night shift isn’t configurable by Shortcut yet.

You can change the whitepoint. Not the same, though, but something.

https://www.iphonetricks.org/the-ios-reduce-white-point-feat...

Re: Apple iOS 13.1 Personal automation via Shortcuts

#55

Post by willis936 »

mikestew wrote: post #51
hart_russell wrote: post #48

The iPhone Xs was my first ever iPhone. Before that I had been an Android power user for 8 years. I installed my own custom ROMs, xposed framework, rooted, etc. Although I'm firmly in the iPhone camp for privacy and other reasons now, I miss the automation provided by Tasker and the Android OS. I used to have many useful location + time based profiles. For instance, I had a profile for if I was at home and it was bet…

Sooooo...a quick skim of the article indicates that personal automations can now do what you're missing. My question is, are you complaining about something that this article specifically addresses, saying "yea! About time!", or...? Because your "point is" is specifically addressed by TFA.

It’s a valid complaint. I haven’t used android in 5 years and I still miss tasker. It’s the kind of basic, important tool that any personal device should have. It isn’t difficult to implement well. There really isn’t a good excuse that it took so long and it is nice to finally have. Every “reason” why it took so long is simply someone imposing their personal opinions onto a wide range of users.

Re: Apple iOS 13.1 Personal automation via Shortcuts

#56

Post by mbolton12 »

philo23 wrote: post #23
adamjcooper wrote: post #5

I've been looking forward to this feature, but I must say I'm pretty disappointed that most of the personal automations still require a manual approval before they will execute. For example, I can schedule a particular shortcut to always run at a specific time. When that time comes, however, my phone will display a notification which I must physically tap to execute the automation. If I miss the notification, nothing…

I've heard quite a few times now that some of the reasons these automations aren't completely automatic is to avoid them being abused by people with bad intentions. Say for example someone setting one up on someone else's phone (without their knowledge) to run every X minutes and using it to track someone's location, without them ever knowing about it. I'm not entirely sure that's the real reason behind these notific…

Apps already do this in the background without end users knowledge. Not saying this is right but it seems odd that it's okay for an app to do this to its users but not a user doing this to themself?

It would be nice if these automations could run automatically but perhaps, notify the user that said automation has run and allow them to easily disable the automation.

Re: Apple iOS 13.1 Personal automation via Shortcuts

#59

Post by ShamelessC »

m0dest wrote: post #40

I'd been trying to figure out why they required a user interaction for some of these. 5 out of 6 of these can be explained by debouncing. • "Wi-Fi" and "Bluetooth" connection triggers are extremely susceptible to bouncing on and off with variable radio conditions • "Arrive", "Leave", and "Before I Leave" are all susceptible to bouncing in and out; they combine a fuzzy location of variable precision with a point and r…

I'm using IFTTT for similar functionality on my Android phone and I've never had a problem with a task bouncing in and out of a specific location. In fact, the location selection process only allows you to zoom in so far on the map to prevent you from getting to specific with your geofence.

Obviously you're not going to be able to write a GPS specific enough to detect which room you're in, but that's expected.

Re: Apple iOS 13.1 Personal automation via Shortcuts

#60

Post by barkerja »

jasongill wrote: post #20
matwood wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Unfortunately the list that requires manual action are the ones I really wanted to run, particularly bluetooth and time of day: https://support.apple.com/guide/shortcuts/enable-or-disable-...

The list of auto-approved items seems somewhat arbitrary, but I think they had privacy concerns in mind when they made the list (although it seems stupid that you can't override those protections if you'd like). All of the ones on the "cannot be run automatically" list are things that a bad actor could do if they had your phone, like wait for a certain time of day, or move your phone to a specific location, or bring…

That's true about the potential for bad actor, but it's also true for many false positives.

Passive automations based on location, bluetooth, wifi, etc. stand a good chance of many accidental triggers. Connections are flaky, location accuracy is flaky; without some form of throttling mechanism or way to better control accidental firings, it should remain manual.

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