Apple’s upcoming iOS 15.4 software update appears to have quietly added a massive quality of life improvement to its Shortcuts app: the ability to turn off those incredibly annoying personal automation notifications that users have set up on their devices, as discovered on Twitter by Fjorden developer Florian Bürger.
The Automation function is one of the most valuable and effective tools that Apple provides to its customers, especially for those who don’t use shortcuts on a regular basis. It allows users to set up basic “if/then” triggers on an iPhone for a variety of conditions, such as a specific time of day, arriving at a location, receiving an email or text from a specific contact, joining a Wi-Fi network, tapping an NFC tag, opening an app, or when your phone reaches a certain battery life.
Shortcuts can be extremely useful when used properly, allowing you to do things like turn off notifications when your Kindle app is open so you can read in peace, automatically turning on sleep mode when your phone’s battery drops below 50%, and turning off the rotation lock when you open the Apple TV app so your shows go full screen properly.
However, until iOS 15.4, Apple had made the feature essentially worthless for everyday work by requiring required notifications if the parameters were met. The latest update corrects this by providing a setting that allows users to disable these notifications, as well as making Apple’s shortcut automations for everyday chores far more user-friendly by removing the spam messages that appeared every time you triggered one.
Simply tap on the automation and toggle off the new “Notify me while running” toggle that appears when you’re running the latest iOS 15.4 beta to turn off the notifications. You’ll have to do this for each notification, but once you’ve done so, the Shortcuts notification bar will no longer disturb you.
However, there are a couple caveats: The new option only automates shortcuts, not all shortcuts. However, if you’re utilizing shortcuts as a workaround for custom iOS icons, you won’t be able to get rid of the pop-up banner when you use that approach to open an app, for example.
In addition, iOS 15.4 provides the ability to utilize Face ID while wearing a mask on newer iPhones, as well as a slew of new emojis. The upgrade is still in public beta, but it should be available in the next weeks, ideally with these exciting new features.
References:
- https://flipboard.com/@cameradude/ios-15-4-makes-shortcut-automations-way-less-annoying-to-use/a-LpKcCh0gQu6oMKlwfFl9yA%3Aa%3A4597337-3e6ef1288e%2Ftheverge.com
- https://public.uk.com/2022/02/07/ios-15-4-makes-shortcut-automations-way-less-annoying-to-use/