I have an alarm clock app that I use every night. I turn it on when I am ready to sleep and turn it off when I get up. It always stays on and in the front when I am using it. I would like to have that app being turned on trigger Do Not Disturb to turn on and the app being off (I always “flick it up” to remove it when I get up) to turn off DND.
Set times for DND in Settings do not work because I am not on a regular schedule. I don’t want to use a shortcut that I have to manually invoke…I may as well just open DND from the Control Center, a method I don’t want to use since it’s too easy to forget to turn it on or off.
I know this would be trivial on the Mac using Keyboardmaestro, but I can’t see how to do it in iOS.
You can have DND turned on when an app launches, but I do not think you can turn DND off when an app “quits” because iOS does not really support the concept of “quitting” apps, although we all know that we can “kill” them in the manner you described.
For turning on DND, I have a similar automation that is tied to when the app “Big Clock HD” is opened.
The screenshot on the left shows where it appears in the Shortcuts app, and the screenshot on the right shows the summary of what it does:
I believe that you can have an alarm run a shortcut, so you could use that as your “wake up” alarm, but I have not done that myself.
Worst-case scenario, you could have a “Morning” shortcut that turned off DND and did whatever else you might want to have happen in the morning, and put that in the widget or home screen so you can manually launch it easily.
Thanks, TJ. That might work. I don’t use a “Morning” shortcut, but I think I could get some use out of one. The other thing I could do is run a timed shortcut to make sure DND is turned off at a time I know I won’t need it, in case I forget to do it manually from Control Center. I have a Backup Shortcuts shortcut now that was posted some time ago. Since Shortcuts won’t trigger shortcuts based on a timer without user intervention, I have it set to run every Friday at 3 PM using Launch Center Pro. As the old infomercial used to say, “Just set it and forget it!” I could do something like that with a Turn Off DND shortcut triggered mornings at something like 7:30 (or whatever time is useful). Using LCP, it’s even possible to set the trigger for different times, e.g. weekdays and weekends.
