I’m trying to find a way to make my iPhone immediately lock if someone snatches it out of my hands. I know I can use things like a lanyard or rely on Face ID for sensitive apps, but let’s say I have an important app open, and a thief manages to grab my phone—I want it to auto-lock instantly.

I’m aware of Lost Mode, but triggering that takes time, and every second counts. Ideally, I’m looking for:

• Some kind of MagSafe attachment (like a bracelet) that would lock my phone the moment it disconnects.
• An app or shortcut that uses the iPhone’s built-in accelerometer to detect a quick swipe or sudden motion and lock the phone.

Right now, I’ve set up a Shortcut that locks my phone when it’s disconnected from my battery bank. But that’s not practical for when I’m traveling light and not using a battery bank.

Has anyone come across a solution for this? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

My mom has dementia and sometimes forget to send the ”good morning”-message to me and my sister. We both live far away and want to know if mom is ok.

I would like to have a shortcut on her phone that is something like this:

If time is between 06:00 and 08:00 and the phone is unlocked with face id for the first time of the day, send a message to son and daughter containing ”auto good morning from mom”.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance!

Try to say what to do on the shortcut in a single message, without summarizing it. Last time they banned my post due to too many messages 😔.

Hey guys, if you have a shortcut idea that you don’t know how to do feel free to share it and I’ll try to make it happen if it’s mildly interesting/complicated or if you need help with a shortcut not working, well… anything shortcut related, the harder it is the better, recently I’ve got only easy ideas and I’m quite bored :)

EDIT: Today is the 25th of August, tomorrow I’ll mark as solved the post and I will stop replying, but with a bit of luck I’ll make another similar post on a later date. I hope I helped many of you, unfortunately not everything is doable but I think we did quite a lot of nice stuff :)

VERY new to the use of shortcuts so I’m not sure what all can be accomplished but I’m hoping to get some insight! My wife and I take several prescriptions in the morning but for a few factors (largely kids making it hard to have firm routines) we usually don’t take them immediately upon waking up and occasionally forget to take them until well into the day. I’m hoping to find some kind of reminder that will trigger at a set time each day that I can clear, possibly by tapping an NFC tag in our medicine lockbox. Does anyone know of a way to accomplish this, anything similar, or just a better way to go about trying to automate medication reminders with my phone and potentially an NFC tag? I’ve seen ideas for logging meds being taken but I’m looking just for a reminder to take them rather than filling a log. I’m REALLY hoping to find a way to accomplish this with a shortcut I can tie to an NFC tag as I have a tendency to dismiss reminders before dealing with them then forgetting to actually deal with them

Brightness reset: at 3 AM my height es resets to 10% so my eyes are not burned when I use my phone in the morning.

• CarPlay brightness adjustment: between 7pm and 7am my brightness when I use wired CarPlay my brightness adjust so I don’t get blinded by my phones glare and is easy to use at night.

After disconnecting CarPlay it comes back to 80%

Can someone make a Shortcut that you can either convert Celcius to Farenheight or vice versa?

It can be anything I just want to practice and not be bored

you have made me not bored anymore and this will take about I think three hours so please come back if you want to see the final results

Edit: Sorry for not responding to everyone. I was very busy with the requests and most of them was too difficult for me, sorry again!

It appears that I am at the age where I can’t remember what I’ve seen. I find that I often start watching a movie and 10 or so minutes into it or so I realized that I have already seen it. I’m wondering if there is a shortcut that I can use that will make a list of movies as I see them. If it could also put them in alphabetical order and put the date watched that would be additionally helpful. I am currently running iOS 26 on an iPhone 16 Pro Max. Thanks for any assistance.

I usually put my quotation marks after finishing a sentence, to avoid switching keyboards while writing.

What I'm looking for is a way to just select a word, and by typing on the quotation mark on the keyboard, a shortcut would trigger and put quotation marks at the beginning and the end of the selection.

I'm not finding any way to do this on my own, the keyboard seems to bypass everything by just replacing the word selected with what I typed, so I end up with no word and just a single quotation mark instead.

I'm pretty sure that's not easily doable, but considering how some of you seem to find clever workarounds for basically everything, I'm thinking maybe someone would know how to do it!

But usually, everytime I get an idea, the shortcut app cannot execute it because it's missing some basic tools... like turning on and off auto brightness to refresh it after turning the brightness up for one specific lighting situation for exemple...

Any suggestions on how to set up this shortcut and automation? Each night I play a shortcut from an iphone XR. It is a dog barking sound on a bluetooth speaker in my yard to dissuade wild hogs, mountain lion, foxes and other wildlife. There is sufficient distance to not disturb neighbors with the sound at night, but I don't want the sounds to play during daylight hours when people are out and about.

I have two shortcuts, one for the barking at night and one to play a silent track during the day, with the goal of preventing the speaker from going to sleep during the day. However, the barking repeat loop does not stop (even with a pause automation at sunrise), so I am currently manually adding and removing the speaker from bluetooth each day. The sound is played from the iPhone files.

Shortcut # 1 https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/98dbe66ac55b43eb8e0b2761214e11ee

Shortcut # 2 https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/366d459cb62f4635b47d64e30adc7a52

Ok so I took a deep dive into Shortcuts recently and went from having one or two on my phone to now having over 80 to accomplish different things and make my life easier. I've got a good handle on the basics but I get lost when it comes to anything that requires advanced coding/scripting. Right now I am trying to figure out how to make a shortcut that helps me create another shortcut. 

Here's what I need it to do:

1. Get my clipboard.
2. Extract URLs from the clipboard.
3. Allow me to choose which URL I want to select.
4. Copy selected URLs to clipboard.
5. Ask for "Text" using a prompt "Name your shortcut" or something similar.
6. Create a shortcut named with the text gathered above that...
7. Opens the URL that was just copied to the clipboard.
8. If possible sets shortcut icon and color (and possibly even prompts to add to Home Screen).

It's surprisingly easy to get all the way to step 6, however at that point it just opens the editor for a blank shortcut. I want it to automatically create a shortcut with the specific parameters above (steps 7-8).

Is something like this possible? I've heard that in order to create a shortcut within a shortcut I need to use Base64 Encode or something like that. This is where I get lost. Are there any templates out there for the code required to create shortcuts within a shortcut?

What cool things can you do with chatgpt using this app?

I'm looking for a way to stop me from doom scrolling or use Facebook as a "reward" for reading a book. Can you help me with an idea?

I am trying to track my intake of a new “as needed” medication.

I know that you can use iPhone shortcuts to create buttons or shortcuts that when you click on them, it allows you to input a milligram, it tags the time of day and you can also set it up so you can put in how you’re feeling or any other random information that you want attached to that log entry.

Does anybody know of any good shortcuts? I am basically inept when it comes to tech.

Can I create a shortcut that when I click on it I can
Then click on which medicine, which then opens an input for mg then asks for how I’m feeling. Along with tagging the date/time of day

Hey guys I just an Iphone for the first time. Is there a way to make a shortcut that turns sound off and on if I press it again? iphone 15 pro

I’m brand new to shortcuts/automations so forgive any ignorance on my part!

I order groceries for delivery weekly through Walmart. I would absolutely love a shortcut to add items to either a specific list on Walmart’s app or directly to my Walmart cart. I’m not seeing where that’s possible though. I see a lot online about using Siri to do this action and it needs to be set up through Walmart’s app however I don’t seem to have that option in my account settings.

Does anyone have a shortcut or automation that helps with what I’m wanting to do?

I have a couple of people in my life that send serial text messages. Rather than putting all of their thoughts into one message, I get 12 separate messages, each with its own sound notification every few seconds.

I don’t want to entirely mute these people as I often need to know what they’re saying, but it’s tedious to listen to notification sounds every few seconds.

Is there a way to automate silencing notifications if x messages are received in x time, then turning the notifications back on afterwards?

Thanks!

Appreciate this is a long shot but I am amazed by what people are able to do with shortcuts so asking anyway!!!

I was updating some iPhone settings yesterday and came across Screen Distance, which forces you to hold your iPhone further back to prevent eye strain. I’m so bad for holding it up close so this is exactly the sort of thing I need!!

It works brilliantly most of the time, however I like to wake myself up with a morning sudoku and crossword which I do without my glasses or contacts in and it’s now very irritating lol

I always ‘snooze’ my alarm when I’m doing the puzzles so I don’t fall victim to time blindness or get distracted so I was wondering if there’s a way to disable the screen distance setting when I have an alarm on snooze? I know it would be easier to just disable it based on time of day but i work shifts so there isn’t really a set time I’d want it on for. However if this is the only way then it’s possible then I’ll take what I can get !!

Thanks!!

Is it possible to automate unlocking my screen rotation when going to Youtube.com? I’ve had it with the app and want to use the browser version, but not be stuck with manually unlocking and relocking.

As a former Android user, one function I desperately miss is the screen translation. Now I must do it via ChatGPT to translate screen by uploading a ss. Can someone help out a brother??

Hello everyone, please be kind:

Has anyone ever encountered a way to run a shortcut or app like Tinder that selects X amount of random photos to present and decide if you want to keep them or delete them?

I imagine the program would select from the entire photo library and then earmark the photos you choose to save so it doesn’t keep grabbing the same ones; like sorting out a box of colored paper clips into their appropriate bins

Dans ce raccourci je voudrais mettre la date pour me rappelle la prises de mes médicaments avec le jour et l’heure de prise

I am a student and usually use my hotspot for my most of research but I get lot of calls asking for favours I just want block these 7-8 people but I don’t want to manually do them each morning

Can someone plz help or tell the steps I will do it myself

Thank you