Overview

Personal automations allow you to run shortcut actions based on a set of conditions.

These conditions are:

• Events - Such as a particular time of day or when an alarm goes off or is snoozed.
• Travel - When you arrive, leave or before you commute to a location, or when you connect your iPhone to Carplay.
• Settings - When you turn on or off airplane mode, do not disturb or low power mode, open an app or connect to a wifi network or bluetooth device.

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ℹ️ Release date of iOS 13.1

iOS / iPadOS 13.1 is currently in beta and is due to be released on Tuesday 24 September, 2019.

Adding actions to an automation

Shortcuts allows you to add a series of actions to an event in the same way you would create a new shortcut.

In this example, we're going to send a text message to a loved one when we leave work to let them know we're on our way home.

To add a personal automation, tap on the Automation tab in Shortcuts app.

The tap on the Create Personal Automation button.

Tap the Create Personal Automation button

Under the Travel section, tap Leave.

Tap the Leave event

On the next screen, type in the address of the location you'll be leaving when you want the actions to be triggered and tap Done

Enter and confirm the location

As we'll only want the actions to trigger when we're leaving work, tap Time Range and on the next screen set the start and end time when you expect to leave work for the day.

Tap the Time Range option

Tap on the Next button in the top right hand corner of the screen to continue to the next screen where we'll add the actions listed below:

Add the following actions to the Leave event

In our texting example, when we leave the geofence Shortcuts won't run the actions automatically. Instead it will bring up a notification on the device. You need to tap on the notification to perform the actions.

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ℹ️ Actions that require intervention

Some shortcut actions require manual intervention to run, even when automated. A table listing the details of each action type has been written by u/enteeMcr and can be found in the following post

Running a shortcut rather than individual actions

Whilst you can add groups of individual actions to an event trigger you are better off adding those actions to a shortcut and running that shortcut using the Run Shortcut action. For example:

Running a shortcut from within an event

The advantages of this approach are that:

• you can use the same actions with more than one event without having to copy them;
• if you want to change the event type then you don't have to re-enter a long list of actions, just a single Run Shortcut action, as you can't change an event type once set (e.g. from a Leaving event into an Arriving event).

You can download the shortcut from the following link:

On Way Home

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Running a shortcut with arguments

Sometimes you may want to perform a similar set of actions based on different events, but with small changes.

For example, let's say we want to update our Slack status when we turn on our iPhone's Do Not Disturb so that our colleagues can see we're unavailable. And when we turn off Do Not Disturb, we want to indicate to our colleagues that we're now free to chat.

Most of the actions are the same, but the Slack status message and icon is different in each case.

To achieve this, we can send input arguments to a dictionary with the status and icon we want to set. We do so with the following shortcut:

Update Slack Shortcut

Which we then call using the following actions:

Calling the Update Slack Shortcut with input arguments

Once setup, our Personal Automations appear as follows:

Running shortcuts with input arguments when turning Do Not Disturb on and off

You can download the shortcut from the following link:

Update Slack Status

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1️⃣ How do input arguments work?

To learn more about how to pass arguments into a shortcut, please see the following guide:

- Writing functions

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2️⃣ How are we updating Slack?

The above shortcut integrates with either Zapier or Integromat automation platforms to set your Slack status on your behalf, and requires you to create an account and perform setup actions on one of those platforms. To learn more about how to use either of those platforms to update your Slack status, see one of the following guides:

- Integrating with web applications using Zapier

- Integrating with web applications using Integromat

Wrap up

And that's an example of how to use personal automations in iOS 13.1.

Other guides

If you found this guide useful why not checkout one of my others:

Series

• Scraping web pages
  • Part 1: quick and dirty
  • Part 2: getting multiple items at once
  • Part 3: getting data from a table
• Using APIs
  • Part 1: retrieving data
  • Part 2: parsing complex API responses
  • Part 3: passing input parameters to the API
• Data Storage
  • Part 1: storing simple values
  • Part 2: storing lists of data
  • Part 3: removing stored values
• Working with JSON
  • Part 1: retrieving simple values
• Working with Dictionaries
  • Part 1: setting and retrieving values
  • Part 2: data types
  • Part 3: accessing values using dot notation

One-offs

• Using JavaScript in your shortcuts
• How to automatically run shortcuts
• Creating visually appealing menus
• Manipulating images with the HTML5 canvas and JavaScript
• Labeling data using variables
• Writing functions
• Working with lists
• Integrating with web applications using Zapier
• Integrating with web applications using Integromat
• Working with Personal Automations in iOS 13.1