In the first seed of the iOS 16 developer beta, the Shortcuts app has received 51 new actions that support interacting with Apple’s first-party apps and help take advantage of system features.
The actions provided work with Notes, Voice Memos, Mail, Safari, Shortcuts, Clock, Parked Cars, Image Backgrounds, Personal Hotspot, Files, PDFs, and Reminders, plus there’s an initial batch of bug fixes for actions and new Mac support for Safari Reader and Evernote actions.
This guide was compiled using a list provided by the Shortcuts team during Q&A sessions at WWDC, plus another post on Reddit and one of its comments, plus some of my own research using the developer betas.
I’ve sorted larger groups into sections, plus marked any actions with * do not currently work in the first developer beta.
New actions
Notes
- Notes
- Pin Notes
- Delete Notes
- “Create Note” and “Append to Note” now support Rich Text
- Tags
- Open Tag
- Create Tag
- Add Tags to Notes
- Remove Tags from Notes
- Delete Tags
- Settings
- Open Notes Account
- Change Notes Setting
- Open Notes View
- Folders
- Open Folder
- Create Folder
- Move Notes to Folder
- Delete Folders
Voice Memos
- Recordings
- Open Recording
- Play Recording
- Create Recording
- Delete Recordings
- Folders
- Open Folder
- Create Folder
- Delete Folders
- Search Voice Memos
- Change Playback Setting
- Open Mailbox*
- Search Mail
Books
- Sections
- Open Book
- Open Collection
- Open Tab
- Actions
- Change Theme
- Resize Text
- Switch Page
- Search Books
Safari
- Create Tab Group
- Open Tab Group
- Open New Tab
- Open New Private Tab
- Open View
- Safari Reader actions are now available on macOS *
Shortcuts
- Open Folder
- Search Shortcuts
- Create Shortcut
- Delete Shortcuts
Clock
- Open Tab
- Clock actions are now available on macOS*
Parked Car
- Set Parked Car
- Get Parked Car Location
- Get Details of Parked Car
Focus filters
- Configure Focus Filter
Remove background
- Remove Background from Image
Personal Hotspot
- Set Personal Hotspot (iPhone-only)
Files
- Search Files
PDFs
- Optimize File Size of PDF
Reminders
- Show Reminders Smart List
Action Improvements:
- “Send Email” now supports rich text on macOS
- “Find Calendar Events” can now filter events for declined or accepted status
- “Set Flashlight” can now control the flashlight on watchOS
- “View Content Graph” has an improved interface
- “Open URL” no longer fails to open FaceTime links
- “Shazam It” no longer fails to run from Siri
- “Find Notes” can now retrieve more than 26 notes at a time
- “Find Photos” no longer fails to run when filtering for a photo album that does not exist on the local device
- Evernote actions return content successfully on macOS
- Get Name has Get Web Page Title parameter
More to come…
This initial set of actions from iOS 16 is very welcome — Apple’s added a lot more native support for their own apps, an encouraging sign that they’ll continue to do so with their remaining apps that do not yet have Shortcuts support.
I’d love to see some of these apps go even further in their Shortcuts support. Apps like Mail could further in letting us retrieve mail to work with, Safari’s tab groups can be created but we cannot pull the tabs out into our shortcuts, and Shortcuts should be able to create Folders now that we can open them — I hope Apple adds these as actions for the iOS 16 release and doesn’t wait until a point release or next year to round out these apps’ Shortcuts adoption.
I’ll be updating this post with new actions added in later betas, along with additional posts explaining what’s new and links back here. Once the public betas are released, these will all be documented in full as part of my Action Directory.
Plus, I’ve already created a ton of shortcuts using these actions (I really love Open Folder):
Made about 115 new shortcuts out of the new actions in the iOS beta already ?
— Matthew Cassinelli (@mattcassinelli) June 9, 2022
Once the public betas are released, these new shortcuts will be available exclusively for my membership during the beta season, so be sure to sign up to get access before the iOS 16 release in the fall.
