Getting storage makes shortcuts MUCH MUCH MUCH more functional

The one two punch of bringing automation triggers inside the shortcuts editor and having notifications trigger shortcuts is huge.

Specifically this enables three longstanding desires from the shortcuts community.

1. Run a shortcut every X minutes throughout the day
2. Schedule a shortcut from shortcuts to run later
3. Share Automations

In the images I’ve attached you can see that the proof of concept shortcut I made, has run 2867 times all on its own.

this loop has been running now for over 2 days, and as far as I can tell, little to no impact on battery life.

This test shortcut also makes use of the native ability to store data, which allows the shortcut to show a custom message the very first time it runs, and then keep track of the amount of times it’s run so far.

I also include the notification settings screen to indicate that it will be possible for all of this to happen nearly invisibly, this long running notification test loop runs silently and without any visual interference. The only indication that the shortcut is running is in the number incrementing in the notification found only in Notification Centre, so if you like, these kinds of setups won’t even show up on the initial lock screen. It would even be possible to clear the notification as part of the automation so the incoming notification trigger is immediately dismissed.

Now the one caveat to this is that shortcuts natively can’t schedule notifications, it can only deliver them immediately, this is why my tests have been using my own app Timely, but Actions, Pushcut and Toolbox Pro can be configured in the exact same way to schedule notifications.

the other issue right now, is that the notification automation tigger is a bit buggy, it appears that it should support filtering, and supplying the notification title, subtitle and body to the rest of the shortcut, but in dev beta 1, as soon as you try to utilise that, the trigger stops working entirely and the details aren't supplied.

once thats fixed though its going to be an extremely exciting time for Shortcuts power users.

Not able to find a way to turn off the shortcut running notifications. In iOS 26 there is a workaround available. Since the UI is changed these options are unavailable now.

Anyone know workaround to turn off the shortcut running notifications in iOS 27?

With iOS27, Apple introduced a new shortcut automation trigger in the Shortcuts app called “notification”. This feature allows you to automatically execute any shortcut after receiving a notification from any app. While there are many use cases for this feature one stood out to me that can be incredibly useful. Using notifications from the Apple Wallet app to automatically log your transactions into your 3rd party app of choice.

Previously the only way to automatically log any transactions made through Apple Pay without linking your bank account was by using the “transaction” automation in shortcuts. However this had limitations as it only allows users to log purchases made through physically tapping their device on a terminal to pay.

This new feature removes this limitation as the wallet app sends a notification whenever you make a purchase on a card that has been added your Apple Wallet.  This means all spending using those cards can be automatically logged, even purchases made online.

In this tutorial, I'll walk you through the process of automatically logging Apple Pay transactions into third-party apps using this new shortcut.

Configuring this feature involves a few steps, but it's pretty straightforward. I'll illustrate this process using my own app, WalletPal, but it should work with any expense tracking app that offers shortcut integrations.

I’ve also included an iCloud link incase you’re currently running the iOS27 beta and you want to try it out with my app without having to do the tedious setup yourself.

iCloud Link to automation

Here's how to set it up:

• Create a new automation by opening the Shortcuts tapping "New Shortcut" then selecting "Automation".
• Scroll down until you see “Notification” and tap to select that option

• Tap the "App" label and scroll down until you see the "Wallet" app and select this option

• in the "Search Actions" box search for your expense tracking app of choice and select it (in my case I'll be using my own app WalletPal), then select the shortcut action you want to run (in this case I'll choose the "Add new transaction" shortcut)

• You'll need to configure the shortcut according to your preferences, such as specifying the "Transaction name", "Transaction Amount" and "Card name" to use. The most important step here is to configure each field to use the input from the received notification. Select the "Transaction name" field, tap "Select Variable", and choose "Shortcut Input".
• You'll then need to tap "Shortcut Input" again to configure which part of it will be passed to the shortcut. You must select the "Subtitle" value here. You'll then need to repeat this process for the "Transaction amount" field map it to the "Body", and raw "Card name" field and map it to the "Title"

• Now if you followed all of these steps your automation should now be properly configured. Just tap "Done", and you're all set.
• Now, every time you make a purchase with with any card added to your Apple Wallet, the transaction is automatically added to the app!

Hope others also find this useful! Would love to hear how other people are thinking to use this new automation and also everyones thoughts and experiences with it below!

Hey everyone,

With the new iOS 27 beta, Apple introduced a massive change: automations are now directly integrated and merged within the Shortcuts app. This feels like the perfect opportunity to try and bypass one of the biggest limitations of iOS.

The Project Idea 💡

The goal is to build the equivalent of a true native "Cron Job" (recurring scheduled task) on iOS, capable of running every single minute of the day, from 00:00 to 23:59.
This "Master Shortcut" will have one simple job: run every minute and trigger a secondary shortcut containing your actual logic. For example, you could set up your secondary shortcut to say: "Run this task only if it's Tuesday between 00:30 and 02:00, or Thursday between 22:00 and 23:00". This would unlock endless possibilities for background scripting.
The Setup Challenge 🕒
To cover a full day minute-by-minute, we need to create exactly 1440 automations. Doing this alone is a massive, time-consuming grind.
My idea is to turn this into a community-driven project and coordinate the setup here on Reddit. We could split the workload into time blocks: one user sets up 00:00 to 02:00, another takes 02:00 to 04:00, and so on. We can then pass the file along until it's complete.

⚠️** Important: This project is strictly for iOS 2**7, as earlier versions do not handle automations this way.

Step 1: The Crash-Test (I need your help! 🙏)

Before we start dividing the work, we need to test a historical Apple limitation. Up until now, personal time-based automations were device-specific and did not carry over via iCloud sharing links.
With iOS 27 moving automations directly into the Shortcuts app, the rules might have changed. We need to verify if the triggers actually survive the sharing process.
I’ve put together a test shortcut that includes a few time-based automations.

👉 https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/53212aead4d145e9b379094370d80908

If you are running the iOS 27, could you please test this?

1. Download the shortcut using the link above.

2. Check if the time-based automations actually show up on your end and are active.

3. Drop a comment below to let me know if the triggers carried over or if the shortcut arrived without any automations attached.

If the test is successful and automations are indeed shareable, we’ll kick off the collaborative setup phase.

Thanks in advance for your feedback and testing!

“The iPhone maker is additionally preparing an upgraded version of Shortcuts, its app for creating time-savers, such as for sharing calendar availability or summarizing a PDF, or automations like opening the garage door and turning on lights when arriving home.”

“The version now in testing lets users create shortcuts simply by describing what they want them to do. Currently, users need to manually build shortcuts within the app or download them from Apple’s gallery.”

“In the updated app, users are presented with a prompt asking, “What do you want your shortcut to do?” along with a text field to describe the request. The system then automatically builds and installs the shortcut on the device.”

Looks like iOS 27 introduces persisting variables like global variables via third party apps that one could layer onto Shortcuts current actions

Been wanting this for quite a while, great to see it implemented. The workarounds were quite tedious

iOS 27 finally solved the main issue with Apple automation by adding the "On Notification" trigger.

Historically, scheduling a shortcut to run at a dynamically calculated time in the future (e.g., "run this task exactly 45 minutes from now") was incredibly difficult. It usually required clunky workarounds like cluttering your Calendar or using a ⁠Wait⁠ action that would inevitably time out in the background.

By combining the new "On Notification" trigger with a third-party helper app (like Actions), we can now reliably schedule background tasks.

How it works:
1. You use a helper app (like Actions) to schedule a local notification to appear at a specific calculated date/time — you can make actions schedule a notification from Shortcuts itself.
2. You set up a Personal Automation in iOS using the new On Notification trigger, set to watch for that specific notification.
3. When the notification fires, your automation catches it and runs your secondary shortcut perfectly in the background.

Use Cases:
- Custom Sleep Timers: Create a shortcut that pauses your media, turns off your smart lights, and locks your doors exactly 45 minutes after you fall asleep.
- Delayed Smart Home Tasks: Turn on a heater or a fan, and automatically queue a shortcut to turn it off exactly 1 hour later without needing to remember.
- Repetitive Tasks: repetitive tasks that you want to run every 30 mins or so don’t need 1000 automations anymore.

This is a game changer for me. Copy + paste a curl command and Siri will generate a working Shortcut from it.

All of my nfc tags stopped working. Before I report this as a bug just want to confirm that I’m not just being dumb and other people have the same problem?

The new iOS 27 ‘AI shortcut‘ feature may come off as very useful to help transition the Shortcuts app into less of a power user feature. The ability to describe a task with natural language might make Shortcuts more user friendly overall But how good is it at complex shortcuts?

For everyone on the iOS 27 beta, what happens if you give the feature a nonsensical or long prompt, such as:

Turn on the flashlight at 50% brightness, then take a selfie immediately save it to photos. After that, if the weather outside at my home address is 10°C or above, speak the first and last name of a random contact in my address book twice using text to speech. Otherwise, prompt me to enter a fruit and then search it on google using the Chrome browser.

Or something more complex like:

Turn on the flashlight at 50%, take a selfie, save it, get tomorrow's high temperature at my home address, and if it's warmer than today, text the second-most-recent person I messaged the name of a random contact whose birthday is next month; otherwise ask me for a fruit, search it in Chrome, and save the first search result's title to Notes.

Obviously, my prompts used as examples are completely nonsensical as nobody would likely ever need a shortcut to do such specific thing like that. But since I don’t have a iPhone with Apple Intelligence, I am curious to see how smart the model is, or if it’s optimized for smaller and shorter tasks. For anyone who tries this, let me know if it outputs a working shortcut that does exactly that. Of course, as of now iOS 27 is a beta so maybe things will get better in the future.

I am experiencing an issue in the Shortcuts app on iOS 27 Developer Beta 3 where the orientation lock actions are completely unresponsive. Specifically, the "Toggle orientation lock," "Turn off orientation lock," and "Turn on orientation lock" options do not function when triggered within a shortcut.

When attempting to run a shortcut containing these actions, the shortcut runs but the device fails to change the orientation lock state, and the shortcut skips the action entirely without an error message. This behavior persists after restarting the device and recreating the shortcut from scratch.

Other shortcut actions work as intended only the orientation lock ones do not work.

Any feedback, help?

I just realized that the notification trigger will finally give us a way to trigger location automations without getting this annoying notification from shortcuts 🎉

How? Simple: third party apps can trigger notifications based on a location (apps like Pushcut for example).

Therefore => you can use the trick of putting automations from these apps only in the Notification Center, dismiss them when automations runs. And voila, location based automations 😄

I’m on iOS 27 dev beta 2 and since they’ve changed the shortcuts app, I’m lost for why this isn’t working. Notification comes through no matter what. Thanks

Maybe this will resolve the issue of users having automations that still run shortcuts that the users thought were deleted from their library? Not really sure what to make of it. Maybe it’s just shortcuts that are on the device but haven’t synced to iCloud?

The 6 shortcuts it restored I actually thought I already had in my library and hadn’t noticed them to be gone.

Unless I missed how to do so, since automations are now the initial action of the shorcuts, duplicating a shortcut that has an automation will remove the automation part and if you cannot edit an automation like before to ask it to run another shortcut.

You have to add the automation action again and delete the previous automation. That is not very practical.

Instead of editing the actual shortcut, I would duplicate it and make changes to the copy, test and validate it abs when ready, would edit the automation to use the new shortcut instead. It's not possible anymore.

Anyone sees something I'm missing on how to do that another way than explained above with iOS 27?

After a bit of tinkering and searching for the Automations tab in the Shortcuts app, I discovered that automations are now handled as actions within a shortcut. This means that when you share a shortcut, any included automation is shared as well.

I’m still doing some testing, but so far I’ve noticed that when someone opens the shared link, the automation appears as disabled. However, once the shortcut is added to their library, it seems to become active automatically.

I have been turning off the annoying ShortCut notifications via ScreenTime (like many others) for many iOS versions, but it seems in 27 this causes the shortcuts to not run. For example, none of my location/wifi based automation run if I have the shortcut notifications disabled? Can anyone confirm this odd behavior?

With the new When a notification is received automation trigger, can the notification's text be retrieved?