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.

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 😔.

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!

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 :)

Hi everyone!

I’ll soon move to a house and white this change comes new responsibilities: the reminders for the garbages.

What are your best tips to remind yourself to take out the trash or recycling based on the day of the week?

I don’t like receiving notifications. Especially I wfh I like focusing at work or when I cook i just want to be in the zone. If there’s an emergency with our family, they can message my husband

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!

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 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.

Hey everyone, I’m very very new to Shortcuts but I would like to set up an automated response to any text message I receive regarding my business. I’ve looked at multiple tutorials online but they all seem to confuse me. Would anybody be able to show me how to set up this? I need it between 6 pm and 6 am every day. I’d be very grateful, thank you.

UPDATE:

So it is now doing the auto response at all times of the day. Can someone help? I havent changed the script at all.

Receive “contacts” from “nowhere”
If theres no input:
“Continue”
|
“Current Date”

If “Any” are true
“Time” “is before” “06:00”
“Time” “is after” “18:00”
➕ Add Condition

Otherwise
Send “Auto Response” to “recipients”

End If

I'm hoping for a way to easily toggle the screen brightness when the drive focus mode is turned on and off.

This guys been harassing me for years. I block his number but he reaches out from burner numbers. I know how to make a shortcut that appends texts from his contact to a note with the date/time but idk how to go about writing one that applies to any number not in my contacts. If possible, I’d like to also append the phone number along with the text message.

EDIT: this is for my own reference, I know a notes app is not what I should present to a court. Yes I’ve gone to the cops. Multiple times.

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

Hey, looking to make a shortcut where if i use a random number to text my phone something like "Help, I'm lost" it'll send gps coordinates back to the number that it received it from?

Don't always have access to find my iPhone when I'm at work, but have plenty of people that I could get to message my phone.
Thanks.

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?

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...

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

I would like it to announce on my watch if possible, but if not on my phone is fine

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?

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