It's a Bug's Life for Shortcuts Lovers
Bugs in Apple’s Shortcuts app
I love Shortcuts and have done since its very beginning, when it launched on iPhone back in 2018. I have over 600 shortcuts (I know that's not much compared to the titans of the Shortcuts community), but I try to keep only the ones I use regularly. They're woven throughout my daily life, from automatically playing podcasts or music when I connect to CarPlay (depending on whether I'm driving to work, or if it's the weekend and I'll be out with the kids or the wife), to reminding me to take the laundry out of the washing machine, or setting the right Focus mode. I love them and I'm constantly tinkering with them to perfect them in my Shortcuts workshop.
Unfortunately, for the last few weeks I've been wanting to fix a bug in one shortcut I use every day, but Shortcuts is refusing to cooperate. I need to add a Set Focus action to a specific section of the shortcut, but every time I select the action, right-click on the action above where I want to place it, and choose "Paste Below," Shortcuts goes haywire, instantly scrolling to the bottom of the shortcut without adding the action. It's driving me nuts!
And this is one of the main problems with Shortcuts. In almost every new version of iOS, there are Shortcuts bugs. Sometimes you can work around them, but sometimes you can't, and you just have to pray to the great Shortcuts god in the sky that they'll be resolved in the next release. That's where I am right now, hoping that iOS 26.5 will fix this. And that is the biggest issue with Shortcuts: there are so many bugs that fans of the app have to live with, yet we carry on and hope for the best. That's simply not good enough.
Does the Shortcuts team know there are bugs in so many of their releases? If they don't, someone needs to spend more time testing the app. And if they do know, this needs to be escalated so that the team has more time to work on resolving them. It's frustrating that such a popular app has shipped with so many significant bugs that make it almost unusable at times. My personal favourite was the one that made the app scroll so fast you couldn't stop at the section you wanted to edit. Issues like this are pushing me towards apps like Jellycuts to see if I can edit shortcuts without using Apple's own Shortcuts editor, which is not a good look for Apple.
I'm also wondering where Shortcuts is headed in the future. Now that I work with more advanced automation and AI tools like Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT, I find myself questioning where Shortcuts fits in. Sometimes I catch myself looking down on the simpler shortcuts I've built, compared to what you can achieve with LLM-powered automation. And so many times, an entire shortcut fails because of a single action error. I'm not sure what the answer is, but I wonder what Apple, and particularly the Shortcuts team, is thinking. I hope Shortcuts is headed to infinity and beyond (and with far fewer bugs), but we'll see. I'm looking at you, WWDC 26.