The Automation Gap

4 months ago 18

Yes, we each share some shortcuts we’ve built, but there’s also a healthy dose of third-party automation apps, services, and AI projects sprinkled throughout. I take that as a sign that automation is alive and well on Apple platforms. At the same time, though, it’s also a symptom of a bigger issue, especially on the Mac, that I don’t think can be ignored given Apple’s push to make apps interoperable via Apple Intelligence.

Nearly three years ago, I wrote AppleScript: Shortcuts Bridge or Crutch?, questioning whether accessing AppleScript via Shortcuts on the Mac was a feature to be celebrated or a red flag, fearing that Apple would use the integration to postpone or never release many of the system-level actions that were missing from Shortcuts’ debut on the Mac.

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Shortcuts’ progress on the Mac has been anything but steady and yearly.

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Shortcuts on the Mac was plagued by design and technical issues that had nothing to do with the actions themselves. It was a rocky start that Shortcuts for Mac has mostly recovered from, but almost four years later, it’s pretty clear that Shortcuts is not the future of Mac automation that Craig Federighi claimed it would be.

He also said that the Catalyst apps, System Settings, and SwiftUI were really great on the Mac.

Jason Snell (Hacker News):

A few days ago, while writing my Podcast Notes update, I realized that I had (inadvertently?) created an automation that begins with a Stream Deck keypress that executes a Keyboard Maestro macro that kicks off a JavaScript script in Audio Hijack that runs an AppleScript applet that executes a Shortcuts shortcut. In recent days I’ve also edited shortcuts that run Python and AppleScript scripts, including some where the shortcut is really nothing more than a Mac UI-friendly wrapper around a bare script, much in the same way you can use Automator as a simple wrapper around AppleScript scripts.

That all these things are possible on the Mac is amazing, and it’s a testament to how flexible and powerful the Mac can be. But it also says something quite profound about how little progress Apple has made with Shortcuts on the Mac (or in general) in the last few years. (And of course, all these workarounds fail on iOS entirely.)

Maybe the drive toward App Intents will help make Shortcuts more powerful and less reliant on tools like AppleScript, Keyboard Maestro, and the rest. But even that isn’t enough, since the Shortcuts app is way too rickety and limited.

John Gruber:

Just debugged a longstanding issue with a shortcut that regexes the <title> out of the HTML source for a URL. The issue is that, believe it or not, there are a lot of websites out there that have many <title> elements per page. The Verge has 40 per article. (View Source on a Verge article and stare too long and you risk going blind.)

Trying to debug this sort of thing in Shortcuts is like trying to tie your shoelaces with chopsticks.

Anyway, I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.

John Gruber:

To me it really paints a picture where the people working on Shortcuts.app do not themselves create even moderate complex shortcuts for themselves. I suspect they sit there and read and address radars but they don’t themselves really use Shortcuts. If they did it would be so much better.

John Gruber:

Shortcuts on Mac has always looked and felt like it was made and designed by people who never used a Mac. Obviously that’s not true because Xcode only runs on a Mac but there’s no point pulling punches on this.

Greg Pierce:

I think there is a strong bit of this being that the Shortcuts team had to dog food SwiftUI on the Mac way before it was ready. As if it even is now.

Scott Willsey:

There are so many issues with shortcuts in general it really doesn’t matter to the end-user the specific reasons, Apple is whiffing it big time. I constantly get sync issues undoing changes or just bizarre logic/capability issues that make me push it aside and write a python script instead.

Greg Pierce:

Ultimately, it’s another indictment of the bean counters, in my mind, who see the analytics and don’t know why they’d give more resources to what is, and will always be, a small user base.

Matthew Cassinelli:

There’s as much wrong with SwiftUI as there are ways for Shortcuts to go wrong.

I think it’s also a larger story where all of us see it as the Workflow programming language, not Siri Shortcuts the feature or their solution for AI.

Until they notice that they have a programming language for an app, it can’t get the level of resources to make it scale.

FlohGro:

If you want to build complicated shortcuts you have to use the graphical editor which is a pain especially for bigger shortcuts. This is freaking annoying and as a software developer myself I prefer writing code above dragging boxes. A language that could transfer into the graphical UI would also be easy to integrate with AI tools so inexperienced uses could create shortcuts with it.

Matthew Cassinelli:

I don’t think I can afford to use Shortcuts for iPad anymore without copy-and-paste for multiple actions.

Just enough of a blocker that I’ll always be better off using my Mac.

Jimmy:

Which is saying a lot, because the Mac app is hot garbage.

The amount of regressions I find in every update is astounding. Forgetting properties, resetting custom date formats, etc.

And why in 2025 is drag and drop of actions so hopelessly janky?

I generally edit big Shortcuts on my Mac as well, but it’s like playing with a proof-of-concept sometimes.

Previously: