Best Shortcuts for iPhone in 2026

Most lists of this kind are padded. They include a shortcut that tells you how many days are left in the year, one that plays a random song, and one that texts your mother a picture of a cat. They are fun for an afternoon and then they sit in your library forever, unused, making the app feel cluttered.

So I set a rule for this list. Every entry has to be something a normal person would run more than once a month, and it has to solve a problem iOS leaves genuinely unsolved. That rule cuts the list down to about nine, which is roughly how many good ones there actually are.

I build a Shortcut myself, so I will declare that up front and put mine at the end rather than the top.

First, the thing nobody explains about shortcuts

A shortcut is worth keeping when it lives where you already are. The Home Screen is a bad place for most of them, because getting there means leaving whatever app you are in.

The share sheet is the good place. That is the menu that appears when you tap the Share button in Photos, Files, Safari or any other app.

A shortcut that appears there catches you at the moment you have the file in your hand and a problem to solve. You turn it on by opening the shortcut, tapping the info button, and switching on Show in Share Sheet.

Do that for the three or four you actually use, and switch it off for everything else. Then open any share sheet, scroll to the bottom of the action list, and tap Edit Actions to drag your favourites to the top. Five minutes of setup that pays back every day.

The ones worth keeping

Text Last Contact. Trivially simple and constantly useful. It opens Messages with a specific person already selected. Put it in a widget and you have a one-tap message to your partner or your parent without three taps of navigation.

Set a timed Focus. Turn on Do Not Disturb for exactly 45 minutes, then turn it off automatically. iOS supports timed Focus natively now, but a shortcut lets you fix the duration you always use so you stop choosing it each time.

Battery-aware low power mode. An automation that flips Low Power Mode on at 30 percent instead of waiting for the 20 percent prompt. Built on the Automation tab rather than the Shortcuts tab, and one of the few automations that genuinely earns its place.

Speak the clipboard. Reads whatever you have copied out loud. Sounds like a novelty until you use it for proofreading. Hearing a paragraph read back catches clumsy sentences that your eyes glide over.

Directions home. One tap to open Maps with navigation to your home address already running. Genuinely useful in an unfamiliar city and takes two minutes to build.

Log something to a note. Appends a line with a timestamp to a specific note. People use this for water intake, mood, expenses, mileage, whatever they are trying to track. It beats any habit-tracking app because the friction is one tap and the data is a plain note you own.

Make GIF. Apple ships this action inside Shortcuts and it produces a genuine.gif file entirely on device. Wrap it in a two-action shortcut and it becomes a share sheet option. Control is limited and long videos produce enormous files, so trim first. I go through the alternatives in how to convert a video to GIF on iPhone.

Encode Media with Audio Only. Another native action almost nobody knows about. It strips the audio track out of a video and hands you an M4A. Free, offline, no third party. The full walkthrough is at how to convert an audio file to M4A on iPhone.

Save as PDF. Safari already does web-page-to-PDF natively through the Share button and the Options row at the top. A shortcut can shave a couple of taps off it. The native route is covered in how to save a web article as a PDF on iPhone.

The ones I would skip

Being useful means being willing to say what is a waste of time.

Anything that scrapes a website is fragile by design. The site changes its markup, the shortcut breaks silently, and you find out when you needed it.

Anything that needs an API key you have to paste in will stop working the day that key rotates. Anything with more than about twenty actions is a maintenance project rather than a tool, since debugging in the Shortcuts editor is genuinely painful.

And be careful with shortcuts from unfamiliar sources. A shortcut can read your clipboard, reach your location, and send data to a server, and the permission prompts move quickly if you are tapping through them. Open an unfamiliar shortcut and read its actions before running it. It is a few seconds of reading against a category of risk people underrate.

Where to actually find good ones

The Gallery tab in the Shortcuts app is better than its reputation. Apple curates it, everything there is safe, and the entries are organised around real situations such as travel, accessibility and photography.

Beyond that, the r/shortcuts community on Reddit is where the genuinely clever work appears, with the caveat above about reading before running. Most shortcut listicles elsewhere are recycled from each other and half the links are dead.

Where Grabio fits

I built Grabio because a specific gap kept irritating me. iOS has no answer for file conversion. You cannot turn a HEIC into a JPG, shrink a video, compress a PDF or pull audio out of a clip without either an App Store download that wants a subscription or a website that wants your file.

Grabio is a Shortcut, so it installs in one tap, has no App Store presence, and costs nothing. It sits in the share sheet. You open a photo, a video, a PDF or an audio file, tap Share, pick Grabio, and get a menu that matches the file type.

Images get format changes, compression to an exact size, resizing, EXIF stripping, photo-to-PDF and background removal. Videos get compression, resolution changes, GIF and audio extraction. PDFs get compression, combining and page trimming. There are QR tools and a webpage-to-PDF option too.

What it does not do is social media downloading. Earlier versions did, and I removed it. Those features break every few weeks when a platform changes something, and a tool that silently stops working is worse than one that never claimed to. The file utilities do not have that problem.

The full explanation of how it is built lives at how Grabio works, and the comparison against the App Store alternatives is at best free video downloader for iPhone.

How to build your first one

If you have never made a shortcut, start with something almost insultingly small. Open Shortcuts, tap +, search for an action, add it, name the shortcut, done. A two-action shortcut that gets used daily beats a thirty-action masterpiece you run once.

Two habits worth forming early. Rename every shortcut to something you would recognise at a glance in a share sheet, since the default names are useless. And export anything you built yourself using Share, then Save to Files, because Shortcuts has no Recently Deleted and there is no undo.

If you want a sense of what a share sheet workflow feels like once it is set up properly, how to convert any file format on iPhone walks through one end to end.

Get the Shortcut if the file conversion gap is one you keep running into. Free, no account, and it lives in the share sheet rather than on your Home Screen.

Frequently asked questions

Are iPhone shortcuts safe to install?

Ones from Apple’s Gallery are curated and safe. For anything else, open the shortcut and read its actions before running it, since a shortcut can access your clipboard, your location and the network. Reading the action list takes seconds and is the single best safety habit here.

Do shortcuts drain the battery?

A shortcut only runs when you trigger it or when its automation condition fires, so an idle library costs nothing. Automations that check conditions frequently, such as location triggers, have a small ongoing cost. A handful of them will not be noticeable.

Why does my shortcut not appear in the share sheet?

The Show in Share Sheet setting is off, or the shortcut does not accept the type of input you are sharing. Open the shortcut, tap the info button, switch the setting on, and check that the accepted input types include the file type you are trying to share.

Can shortcuts run without an internet connection?

Many can. Anything using only on-device actions, such as Encode Media or Make GIF, works in aeroplane mode. Anything that fetches from the web or talks to a service needs a connection.

Do my shortcuts sync across my iPhone, iPad and Mac?

Yes, through iCloud, as long as Shortcuts is enabled in your iCloud settings on each device. This is also why a deleted shortcut can reappear when another device syncs a stale copy back.

How many shortcuts is too many?

There is no technical limit, but a library past roughly twenty becomes hard to search. The practical test is whether you can find the one you want in under five seconds. If not, delete the ones you have not run in six months.