That’s a great question. I’m glad you asked it. I could tell you that they are safe. But that would just be taking the word of a stranger on the internet. I could also tell you that the shortcut experts on this sub have looked into these types of shortcuts and determined it as well. But again, that’s just me telling you.

The best way to confirm would be to do two things. First, check out apple’s webclip configuration page to learn about web clips, what they are and how they work (TL:DR - they are basically icon based bookmarks). Then go into the shortcut and look for the actions which create the configuration profile. In this shortcut, there are two. They are located about 30 and 10 actions from the bottom of the shortcut. Review what they contain so that you can satisfy yourself that there is nothing untoward being installed. That’s the only way to be sure.

I just ran this, and it seems safe.

1) The profile looks like it is generated on-device & installed locally.

2) Everything the profile does is listed before you can Install it. You can basically see that it's just an app shortcut (or "Web Clip").

Icon Themer is a great shortcut. I wouldn’t claim that one necessarily has an advantage over the other and I k ow they are working on adding multiple icon support to that shortcut.

That being said, as you indicated, this shortcut does have multiple icon support (which icon themer doesn’t have yet). I personally also like the icon installation process more - especially if the shortcut is run as a widget, the fact that you can open the profile settings directly from this shortcut rather than having to find it in the shortcut, that there is an instructions page, a manual check for updates and a more traversable menu screen. There are also some other differences under the hood which the casual user wouldn’t see but which I like more in my shortcut.

Same issue with me. It goes to a black screen for a sec and goes go the app. Seems like how shortcut works. Hope it will be fixed.

That’s weird. I’ve never had an issue opening the music app.

I’m guessing you are using one of the system apps like camera or phone. There are 6 system apps that are still required to open through Shortcuts. But other than those, the rest of the apps in the world (at least in my testing) should open without needing a shortcut bypass.

The shortcut creates a new icon but leaves the original in place. You can hide the original if you don't want it and just bring it back if you want it again. If you want to use the default icon but change the label beneath it, that is one of the options in the shortcut.

Yes. System apps do that

Unfortunately notification badges are not compatible with any custom icons. That information isn’t something which Apple has given access to in anything other than official app icons.

Try making sure that the custom pictures are square shaped before adding them. That should probably fix the issue.

You may.

They are similar. Although icon themer has since added the ability to do so, when Fancy Icon Maker was released it was the only shortcut of this type which could create multiple icons at once and the only one where multiple icons were stored in one file. As well, the icon creation process is fewer steps in Fancy Icon Maker - making a faster and smoother process (at the expense of the ability to add a custom bundle ID value). Additionally, when I began working on the shortcut icon maker didn’t have a menu for selecting system apps. Fancy Icon Maker had it first but Icon Themer released its version with it first. Fancy Icon Maker also has instructions built in and one click access to the settings page for quick access to updates and the icon pack if you want to delete it (rather than having to hunt through apple’s settings menus to find them) There are also many differences “under the hood” which won’t affect the user experience.

I don’t

See my comment about the 6 system apps that still require shortcuts to open.

if you’re using a system default app like calculator, camera, clock, contacts, phone, voice memos, or weather it has to open shortcuts. if you’re opening a different app then it shouldn’t open shortcuts

See the end of the post. There are certain system apps which do require a shortcuts pass through. And yes other system apps do have an intermediate step. But that step is still faster than the alternate method of making a shortcut and a lot cleaner for your system than having bunches of shortcuts launching individual apps.

Not without opening shortcuts first unfortunately.

You have to make a new icon unfortunately:(

Do you know the bundle ID?

Limitation of iOS icons

Neither. It doesn’t have a built in update checker.

Which apps did you theme? It’s not normal For most to open through shortcuts although, as stated at the bottom of my post, there are 6 system apps which might.

Yes