The right shortcuts can give your iPhone superpowers. Here’s how

Chris Velazco

Back in high school, Spencer Tamburello’s iPhone would automatically check a local news website every morning to see whether snow had shut down his school.

If school were closed or delayed, his phone would automatically shut off his alarm and send a text message to his parents asking to let him sleep in.

Those precious extra hours of sleep came courtesy of Shortcuts, a free app that has come preinstalled on iPhones since 2019. It’s easy to overlook since its name doesn’t tell you much, but it can be a powerful way to make your iPhone perform complicated tricks or handle tasks for you, as Tamburello found, before you even wake up.

The second-year Ohio State electrical engineering student says: “A lot of times I’ll use a shortcut in front of someone and they’re like, ‘What? What did you just do?’ It’s always very fascinating to see the lights go on.”

Shortcuts range from super-simple to startlingly sophisticated. You don’t even need be an engineer like Spencer to teach your iPhone helpful new tricks. Here’s what you should know.

What is a shortcut, anyway?

Basically, it’s an easy way to tell your iPhone to perform a bunch of tasks to solve a specific problem.

It’s a bit like coding, but you don’t need a background in computer science – just a willingness to break down a problem into steps.

Here’s an example: I take screenshots almost constantly to remind myself of something I’ve seen online or in an app. To help free up storage on my phone, I built a shortcut that asks whether I want to delete them all at once, or just the ones older than a month that I’m probably never going to look at again.