Shortcuts and iOS 15

In my experience so far Shortcuts is just a hot mess in iOS15. Many shortcuts of mine that have worked for years are failing. And good gracious… certainly make no attempt to use the editor to try to troubleshoot. A total exercise in futility. Looking forward to resolution soon.

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Yes there’s been a hit of talk about this either here or on the Automators forum.

Federico had to add a section to his iOS review devoted to the issues. He said it is so buggy he can hardly use it or recommend it.

Surprising and disappointing for the year they’re bringing it to macOS. They seem to have taken their eye off the ball in a big way, and I’m worried it will haunt Shortcuts for a long time if the first version on macOS is unreliable.

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The latest episode of Automators has quite a bit from @MacSparky and @RosemaryOrchard on the subject.

To take a slightly different view than @tjluoma, I think the Shortcuts team took on something hugely ambitious: a full cross platform rewrite of the Shortcuts app in SwiftUI. Based on the .0 iOS and iPadOS release they’ve clearly fallen a bit short (here’s hoping they can make some progress by the time Monterey releases). However, there’s something to be said for reaching for the brass ring. For all the bugginess in the current release, it may be better that the Shortcuts team had the ambition to reach for cross-platform shortcuts nirvana this year. It brought us Shortcuts on the Mac, a ton of new actions on iOS/iPadOS rooted in Automator on the Mac, and the hope that the current Shortcuts app gets the bugs ironed out in a point release. Would we trade that off for a less-buggy Shortcuts app with no macOS version and not much in the way of new features on the iPad and iPhone?

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You may be right. My comment is based off the fact that I reported some simple bugs in the first beta which are still there in the final. I’m surprised by that, whatever the reason for it is.

For example, I have a very simple shortcut that prompts the user for input twice and then opens a URL which is fixed except for the two pieces of text the user adds.

It stopped working in beta 1 and still doesn’t work.

It’s about as simple of a shortcut as you can make.

The problem seems to be that the shortcut does not seem to exit properly after it opens the web browser. I have to go back to Shortcuts and tap it again to stop it before I can run it again.

I might be wrong but it just seems like sound a simple, foundational thing that I can’t really understand how it broke in the first place, much more how it could have survived the whole beta process.

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Despite the fact that they hang the “Safari” label on both, “the web browser” on iOS ≠ “the web browser” on macOS. This is just the sort of thing I’d expect would run into issues in the year of Shortcuts on the Mac.

This is a shortcut on iOS, not macOS. It worked great in iOS 14. Hasn’t worked at all in iOS 15.

While I’m on the 15.1 beta I haven’t tried Shortcuts creation in a while.

What are others’ experiences with Shortcuts on the 15.1 beta?

Have you tried ending the shortcut with the new “stop and output” action?

That solved some of my shortcut issues. They now at least exit gracefully

Oh, and I was so looking forward to Shortcuts on the Mac!

I appreciate the ambition of change but they’ve left a minefield of damage IMO. I feel it borders on careless given the fundamental nature of the problems. Perhaps an unfair view, but this is a “production” app just like their others. It should be treated as such.

I did try it.

It did not fix it, unfortunately.

But I appreciate the suggestion.