I have quite a long history with Shortcuts. Back to do the days of Workflow, I have been off and on with shortcuts. I have written a number of fairly complex shortcuts, a couple that heavily get used everyday.
However, more and more I face complete instability with shortcuts, from small things like mass duplication of shortcuts (which I can deal with), to outright failure of shortcuts to work at all…From what I can tell, I’m not the only one, but is my case extreme and does anyone have any suggestions?
So a little more context, my two more major issues are as follows:
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There are times, where for some unknown reason, shortcuts just fail to execute any shortcut, you will start a shortcut and it will just hang, and if left, it would sit there for hours. On my iPhone 14 the progress bar will sit there in the Dynamic Island. I can stop the shortcut, run a different shortcut, quit and restart the app and they will all just hang. The only way to sort is to reboot the phone and then shortcuts will happily will happily run for a couple of days to a week and then for no obvious reason, it just hangs again.
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For some of my more complex and longer shortcuts (sometime they reach out to other shortcuts as functions etc) they will just break, again for no obvious reason. I could have developed the shortcut spending hours building and testing and then using it for a while with no issue and all of a sudden I get “There was a problem running this shortcut” and nothing else. If I attempt to edit the shortcut, the app crashes. If I duplicate the shortcut, the duplicate also crashes the app (sometime even duplicating will cause a crash). If I share, it crashes. If I import from a backup, the imported shortcut crashes. Note, I can edit the shortcut on my Mac but it uses actions not supported on the Mac so can’t run it.
So, what have I done? I recently tried removing the shortcuts app from all devices, disabling shortcuts syncing in iCloud and deleting all the iCloud data and reimport shortcuts from a backup. That seemed to work ok for a little while but the issues came back.
Does anyone have any other suggestions before I wipe my phone completely? I am running iOS 17.6, no Betas anywhere. These problems have plagued me intermittently for well over a year so would be very happy if anyone has any suggestions.
Right now, I’ve completely fallen out of love with Shortcuts which makes me sad.
Thank you all.
