sindresorhus
commented
1 year ago Many have said that Apple should provide Lock Screen widgets for Shortcuts, and I totally agree, but that's not mutually exclusive with this proposal.
For example, the current Home Screen widgets for Shortcuts are very limited. Third-party apps and widgets solve a lot of use-cases Apple doesn't care about. That's why frameworks like the proposed one are important.
Description
Shortcuts are immensely powerful and users want them everywhere. However, for third-party developer, it’s inconvenient to accommodate them. Say you have an app, and you want users to be able to run a specific shortcut when tapping something in your app. The only way to do that is to make the user manually write the name of the shortcut (and hope they don’t have a typo) and then use the URL scheme * which opens the Shortcuts app, breaking the users flow. This makes for a bad user-experience. I think Apple can do better.
I propose making a Shortcuts framework that would return the user’s shortcuts and let an app run them in the background.
For example, with the recent launch of iOS 16 and widgets on the Lock Screen, and lot of apps have sprung up to let users run shortcuts from the Lock Screen. The problem is the user-experience. When tapping a widget, the widget first has to open the main app, which then opens the Shortcuts app, which then runs the shortcut, and when done, the user is forced to manually close the Shortcuts app. With a Shortcuts framework, the widget could simply run the shortcut directly. This would make for an amazing user-experience.
Thanks for considering.