Apple Shortcuts: The Most Underrated Feature on Your iPhone

My shortcuts rabbit hole started in 2021 with a small frustration. Facebook was fading out for most people, and for many of us the only reason to keep it around was birthday reminders. I did not want Facebook to be in charge of that.

So I added my friends' birthdays to their contact cards and made a simple shortcut that checks every day at noon to see if anyone has a birthday.

It worked. Problem solved.

Soon after, during the vaccine rollout, I wanted a faster way to pull up my vaccine card when I was heading somewhere. The shortcut was simple, but while building it I realized you can pin shortcuts to your home screen. That small discovery changed how I thought about the app.

Then 2022 hit and ChatGPT showed up. There was no official app yet, only an API. I noticed Shortcuts could send HTTP requests, so I built a shortcut that let me have full back and forth conversations with ChatGPT. This was before the iOS app and long before voice mode.

That was the moment it clicked.

Shortcuts was not just a tiny automation toy. It was a platform.

If you write code every day, the programming model in Shortcuts can feel basic. The language is simple and the logic is not fancy.

That is not the point.

The real power is that your life is already mapped into Apple's ecosystem: location, email, calendar, health data, workouts, and app activity. Shortcuts gives you a clean way to tap into all of that and do something useful with it.

Want to run something when an email arrives from a specific sender? Easy. When you open a certain app? Also easy. When you arrive at a location? Same story.

Once you realize how much context is available, the simple logic feels less like a limit and more like leverage.

My favorite example is a fully automated expense tracking system powered by email and Shortcuts.

Here is the flow:

1. I configured Chase to email me for every card transaction over one cent.
2. I set up a Gmail folder that automatically catches those emails.
3. When a new expense email lands, a shortcut parses it and writes the transaction into a spreadsheet.
4. A second monthly shortcut cleans up the sheet by removing duplicates and normalizing entries.
5. Then I loop through each transaction and send it to Claude for categorization: dining, subscriptions, groceries, and so on.

The result is a monthly breakdown that matches how I actually think about spending.

Setup took maybe one to two hours.

The lesson is always the same. The value is not in writing complex software. The value is in connecting data you already have in a way that works for you.

Another example powers the run map page on this site.

After every run, a shortcut extracts GPS data from my workout and sends it in a web request to a spreadsheet on a Mac mini in my office. From there, a small pipeline forwards it into the database that feeds the public page.

About a minute after I finish a run, it is live.

No manual entry. No extra app. Just one shortcut that runs once and handles the rest.

The pushback I hear most from developers is maintenance. Software breaks, APIs change, and automation can rot.

That concern is usually valid, but this setup is different. I am operating in a tightly controlled ecosystem that Apple owns end to end. The foundations do not shift that often. I build a shortcut, run it, and mostly forget about it.

Most of mine have been running for over a year with no changes. I expect occasional edge cases over time, but in practice maintenance has been close to zero.

If you are a hobbyist programmer, Apple Shortcuts is worth exploring seriously.

If you have wanted to automate parts of your life but did not know where to start, this is one of the easiest entry points I know.

The app is already on your phone. The data is already there. You just have to connect the dots.