Actions vanished from Shortcuts

[Ezku]

Description

Hello,

I’ve been using Actions pretty extensively, and a lot of my daily shortcut workflows depend on it. Thus far it’s been quite reliable, too.

Yesterday, these shortcuts stopped working altogether. On inspection, any actions from Actions just… aren’t recognized by Shortcuts any longer, showing instead up as blank ”Unknown Action” items, which however do have the Actions.app icon as expected.

Some things I was able to verify so far:

• uninstalling and reinstalling Actions has no effect
• restarting iOS has no effect
• this kind of ”Unknown action” is distinct from the state where an app has been offloaded; the latter has a ”View in App Store” prompt
• it doesn’t appear that this was due to a recent update to Actions; 2.3.0 was a week ago, according to App Store, but worked fine so far
• it doesn’t appear that this was due to an iOS update; I believe it’s several days at least since I upgraded to 16.3.1
• for the output of Actions previously used in a shortcut, shortcut still correctly shows the name of any magic variable referencing the action’s output

I’m at a loss. All my workflows are halted until I can fix this somehow. I have absolutely no idea how to debug further.

Any ideas?

Best regards, —Eevert

macOS/iOS version

iOS 16.3.1

Shortcut URL

No response

[sindresorhus]

Try trick number 4 here: https://www.makeuseof.com/how-to-fix-troubleshoot-widgets-iphone-ipad/

[Ezku]

Thanks for the suggestion. I gave it a few attempts and concluded

• switching the primary language does force some kind of cache flush
• after switching, Shortcuts ▷ Shortcut ▷ Add Action (▷ Apps) takes a good long while to populate the list of options
• when the list eventually appears, Actions still isn’t on the list
• this outcome does not change if you add an iOS reboot step between switching languages and checking shortcuts

So, I’m afraid that didn’t work. Any other suggestions? 🤔

[Ezku]

I’m uncertain if there’s any conceivable use for this, but just in case — here’s an example shortcut I’ve been using daily, with an action from Actions right at the top.

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/1a4e9459379541c182afc71b91ca525b

Looks like this on my iPhone:

[Ezku]

Tried offloading Actions:

This triggered the ”View in App Store” missing action state in Shortcuts:

However, after clicking on the prompt and redownloading, the no-CTA ”Unknown Action” reappears:

[bmaciag]

Have the same issue with iOS 16.3.1 Restart, changing language, uninstall did. not work. Exactly the same behavior as you have

[sindresorhus]

I tried publishing a new release to see if that would help. Can you try the latest update (2.3.1)? Make sure you restart your device after updating.

[bmaciag]

For me it works now. Thank you

[n1kDon]

Restarting iPhone helped me after first install. Maybe you should prompt that at the welcome screen of the app.

[Ezku]

Thanks for looking at this, @sindresorhus. Nice to hear the update seems to have worked for others. Me, not so much.

1. Install Actions update
2. Reboot
3. Shortcuts takes a long time (2 minutes or so) to refresh available actions
4. Actions doesn’t appear

I also tried a more heavy-handed approach, which turned out to be a mistake.

1. Uninstall Actions
2. Uninstall Shortcuts
3. Reboot
4. Reinstall Shortcuts
5. Reinstall Actions
6. Lost all my shortcuts (which were supposed to be safely synced to iCloud), still no sign of Actions

Any ideas?

[HeeroML]

I also have this issue and followed above steps. Yes this is closed, but not fixed