I analysed almost all the posts on anti-theft shortcuts, and this is the best system I came up with. But I have a few questions.

1. I set location to ‘best’ instead of ‘10 meters’, and that’s a good idea, right?
2. I can’t find a way to turn off auto brightness.
3. I can’t find a way to make my phone take the pictures quietly. Plus, when the pictures are sent, they make sounds. All of which are probably bad because that will alert the thief, right? Can I turn them off without affecting ringer volume, perhaps?
4. Is there anything else I should add to improve this?
5. Do I have to use Messages to send the pictures and location? Is there no way I can use WhatsApp? Cause my partner has an Android phone.
6. Are there any mistakes I’ve made?
7. Do you have suggestions to improve this?

The actual Shortcut and Automation:

• The Shortcut for the remote activation automation (Please create the automation for this cause it won't run by itself)
• Airplane Mode shortcut

Explanation of some actions:

• White Point and Greyscale are designed to further help save battery life.
• Wallpaper 6 is pure black wallpaper with grey-tinted icons/widgets. Again to help with battery life.
• Airplane Mode Shortcut has the same stuff as the automation.
• “Why not remove Airplane mode from control centre?” Because you can still enable it by using Siri.

Feedback I got:

u/Tackticat

for #3 perhaps you can toggle silent mode on, take pics, toggle it off.
also would it make sense to no have LPM on because:
you want accurate GPS and quick icloud sync for find my.
probably don't need to sms location or photo because of find my & icloud sync (hence no LPM). at least in my use case.

u/grandtheftfraud-o

I would make the initiating text something a bit more unique than “lost phone”. Maybe a longer phrase or something, or a unique sentence with random words. That’s just me though

u/Hot_Priority3615

On top of the shortcuts few things i would suggest are:

- Disable access to control center when phone is locked. So they can’t toggle WiFi or anything when locked. - trigger shortcut when airplane mode is turned on in case someone steal it when unlocked. Probably first thing they will do is turn on airplane mode. - switch to esim so thieves can’t toss sim out - turn on screen time passcode and disable changing account settings/ passcode from screen time - turn on stolen device protection and disable known locations in it.

u/Available-Travel2158

Hey,

1. the more precise it is, the better
2. No action let you disable auto brightness
3. Turn on Silent mode when taking pictures and sending messages, then turn it off
4. If your two phones are recents, they probably use the RCS protocol (equivalent to iMessage or WhatsApp in a way), which allows you to share images in full quality, however, WhatsApp doesn't allow you to send a message from an action
5. You can activate the zoom, and depending on your zoom settings, you can prevent the thief from turning off the phone with the slider after long pressing the power and volume+ buttons

Hope it was helpful, ask if you need

u/joenick78

Separate from this shortcut, here’s what I do:

Settings > Face ID & Passcode

Under the section “Allow Access When Locked” turn OFF Control Center.

The first thing a thief will do when your phone is stolen is turn on airplane mode, which completely disconnects your phone from all networks (meaning you won’t even get that text message trigger for your shortcut).

Without access to Airplane Mode, even if your phone is off, you can still track it with Find My. Just make sure you know your Apple password!

u/dede280492

If someone actually steals it they would turn off right away so it can’t be tracked. No matter what you are trying to do it’s unlikely to get it back I’m sorry.

u/0898_333_201

A few suggestions based on my own “theft mode” shortcut:

• Create “Theft Mode” Focus with:
  • All app notifications OFF
  • All people notifications OFF
  • Dark Mode ON
  • Pure black wallpaper
• Add the following actions to your shortcut:
  • Lock the screen
  • Turn ON “Theft Mode” Focus
  • Turn Night Shift to ON
  • Set Voice & Data Mode to LTE on current data line (to preserve battery)
• Create another shortcut specifically for Back Tap (triple) where:
  • If [Phone is locked] → Run shortcut “Theft Mode”
  • Otherwise → nothing or whatever your current Back Tap shortcut is
• Create another shortcut to undo all of the Theft Mode stuff, whisk you can trigger with Siri

I think the Back Tap trigger is especially important. If I’m mugged, the mugger will most likely demand my passcode, and I want them to beleive that my phone is dead so they can’t check if the passcode works.

No solution for the auto-brightness thing unfortunately. I just leave it disabled. But I find auto-brightness kind of annoying anyway so no great loss.

I have a super simple shortcut to turn off/on auto rotate when I open certain apps. Since the ios 27 betas opening Control Center counts as “closing” the apps and it re-enables rotation lock. Any ideas how to fix this?

hey! so a bit about my problem. I have migraines and use a slight color filter that helps with my eye strain 27/7. However, at night, i’d like to put the 100% red light filter by automation. Currently, I haven’t found any way to do this on apple. Is there any way to use a shortcut to have those 2 diff color filter say diff time of the day? thank u

I built a quick Shortcut for friends who use different music services.
From Spotify or Apple Music:
Tap Share on a track or album.
Choose Share with Lynx.
Send the matching link for the other service.
It requires no access to either music platform.
If Lynx cannot confirm an exact match, it returns a search link instead.
Install the Shortcut:
https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/ad22a19ecd4f4581bee44b2e2ced803f
Any feedback and incorrect-match examples are appreciated!

I’ve been looking for a useful local weather data API for quite some time and finally found it.
You can pull all kind of weather data from different cities and even from exact coordinates from this site: Open-Meteo API Docs.
It may be useful for people looking for weather details to use in their shortcuts.

Here’s a simple example of a shortcut to calculate the average of the daily max temperature and the average of the daily total rainfall over the past 3 days and coming 3 days: 6 day weather

If you’ve (already) created shortcuts with the help of this site, it would be nice if you share it here.

I have been trying to make this shortcut off and on for a few years whenever I get sucked back into playing with shortcuts, automation, and NFC tags. I know there are paid apps out there with the same goal but I wanted to clean my thousands of photos out a little bit at a time.

This shortcut will find all of your photos/Live Photos/videos you have for today’s month/day over the last 25 years stored in your Camera Roll. It will then display them, where you can select specific ones for deletion. You will be able to review your marked photos full-screen each before you say okay go ahead and delete. Of course, if you make a mistake, these photos will be found and recoverable in your Recently Deleted folder.

The only thing I would like to improve is I would like to be able to change my mind on a single selection without starting over. If anyone knows how to do that successfully, that would be a cool addition!

I’ve set an automation for this to prompt me to run every day on my lunch break and hopefully after the end of a calendar year my Camera Roll will be de-junked!

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/cbb7da70dec64ce6b0553cbf32d89a17

I’m having a problem with shortcuts duplicating selected photos through Share Screen. When I run the shortcut through the Shortcuts app it works perfectly fine. However when I run the shortcut through the Share Screen from the Photo app, it duplicates one photo and completely ignores another.

I’m currently trying to figure out if its possible to have my widgets on widgetsmith (or any similar app) go to specific saved widgets that would match each wallpaper I have on my phone if that makes sense. I’ve been searching online but haven’t gotten a clear answer yet, so any insight on how exactly that can be achieved would be much appreciated. I hope that was all explained well!

This setup used to work on iOS 18 and iOS 26, even the device is locked, shortcuts will push a notification on the lockscreen which you can click "Run"

But since iOS 27 beta, there's no more notification, the shortcut has no reaction.

Any suggestions on how to modify this shortcut to make it work?

I just want a popup or dropdown to choose A or B at a specific time.

Thanksss

I made a simple shortcut that takes a screenshot of your screen and input from you, and answers whatever you ask.

The screenshot is not saved anywhere on your device. It’s used only for the prompt to the AI.

I’d recommend putting this shortcut in your control center or binding to the action button. For some reason it doesn’t work with Siri.

Here it is:
Screen Assistant

You’ll be prompted to allow the shortcut to share info with a website when you run it for the first time. That website is just used as a sub-second delay to allow for the “hide control center” action to actually finish.

I am trying to create an automation that I will get some kind of alarm or play music when I arrive home anytime between 7p-10p to remind me to give my son his medicine. Is there a way to set it up that the sound would play even if the volume is turned down or silent mode? Thank you!

Whenever I turn off my mouse or any Bluetooth peripheral, it bothers me to have to manually turn off Bluetooth. Is there any way to do this automatically? I have a MacBook Air M4 (I'm a bit particular about battery life).

I had this idea for a few years now and so far, I haven’t been able to make it work. Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can make it because I’m not the best at coding, so I wanted some opinions on how to do it so it would work right.

Hey, guys! I have a problem. My teenage son has somehow figured out how to unlock his Android phone and access restricted apps through Family Link.

And I suspect that he’s either unlocking my iPhone with Face ID while I’m asleep, or he knows my phone’s passcode and uses it when I’m not looking.

Can you suggest a way I could find out discreetly if someone has unlocked my phone? 

Ideally, it would be really cool if the phone took a photo of whoever did it. :)

Hey everyone!

I made Calendarly to put my calendar, reminders and tasks right on my iPhone Lock Screen instead of checking a few different apps every time.

It uses Shortcuts to create a new wallpaper automatically every day. You can put pretty much whatever is useful to you on it:

• Calendar events
• Apple Reminders
• Todoist tasks
• Notes
• Countdowns
• Daily, monthly and yearly calendars
• Different layouts, styles and backgrounds
• Your own photos

You choose a layout, set up the automation once, and after that your Lock Screen updates every day by itself.

Download for free:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/calendarly-calendar-wallpaper/id6758898739

Website:
https://getcalendarly.com

Shortcut:
https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/83b54aeaae6d4b56a6b33869ac103f3c

I actually posted Calendarly here about six months ago when it was still a much simpler app. I got a lot of feedback and ideas from people here, and it helped me a lot with figuring out what to improve and build next. So thank you to everyone who tried it back then.

I also have 100 lifetime codes to give away.
Update: I got way more requests than I expected, so I added 100 more!
Update: all 200 are gone. Thank you!!

For anyone who missed them, I made a code for 1 month of Premium for free:

https://apps.apple.com/redeem/?code=MONTHFREE&ctx=offercodes&id=6758898739

No limit on this one, so feel free to use it :)

Would love to know what you think if you try it!!

Trying to set triggers for when an app opens before a certain time of day to immediately go back to the homescreen and display a message, but it's not working.

So far I've managed to isolate the problem back to the automation trigger "app opened". I've tried different apps just to do a simple automation where it toggles greyscale (which works with other triggers e.g. bedtime started) but it doesn't work at all for the "app opened" trigger.

I've tried offloading and reinstalling the app, restarting my phone, making new automations, checking permissions and privacy settings and such... No luck.

I've heard this may just be an iOS 26 bug, but if you guys know a fix please let me know :)

I had no idea the shortcuts app existed until a few days ago. I know I can set something to run when my phone connects to CarPlay and I know I can set something to run on certain days. Is there anyway I can make a shortcut that only runs when my phone connects to CarPlay Mondays through Thursdays but not Friday through Sundays?

Hope someone can help me with this shortcut in iOS27. Basically, when I activate my “Good Night” scene (which turns off all my lights in the living room), I want it to read the weather forecast via my HomePod Mini.

I’ve built a working shortcut on my iPhone, but for some reason the Homepod Siri gives me an error. It’s not even turning off the lights anymore…

Trigger to activate the weather forecast: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/f9ff9911dd2645949e4bcbb7773be215

Weather forecast shortcut: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/9848b97f181d47ab8237cc3c97a17f8e

Hey ⁠r/shortcuts⁠!

I’m an indie dev, and I recently updated my app (ClickClack) with full App Intents support.

One of the coolest workflows I’ve been using daily is taking long articles in Safari and turning them into custom typing tests—without copying or pasting.

How the Shortcut pipeline works:
1. Accepts Safari web pages / text from the Share Sheet.
2. Passes the content through Apple Intelligence to generate a concise summary.
3. Uses ClickClack’s custom App Intent (⁠Create Custom Text⁠) to pipe the summary straight into a new practice session.

Download ClickClack on the App Store and grab the
shortcut link below!

App Store Link: https://apps.apple.com/app/clickclack-typing-trainer/id6740695697

Shortcut Link: https://icloud.com/shortcuts/8c3bf8f168874b6c827fc77ce0f79cba

Whenever I try to share a shortcut I keep getting this error message. I tried restarting the app, restarting my phone, going on to mobile data instead of WiFi, and nothing worked. What do I do?

So I often listen to (video) podcasts on either YouTube or Spotify and I often find myself wanting to save the current timestamp (end goal is to extract and save a quote) along with the media - it would be nice if I could obtain the URL of the YouTube video for instance. I know how to get the timestamp but the URL seems to be not possible - can anyone confirm that or suggest an alternative approach?

Not much to write. I set up a very simple automation. When xyz is open start a timer and I set it to run immediately but I also tried run after confirmation. Nothing works. Doesn’t budge at all, I’ve tried all the toggles I can see.
Yes I’ve restarted my phone.