Did anyone have success in starting a shortcuts shortcut with a flic button?
I’ve tried starting it via Advanced > Internet Request but it (apparently) does not recognise url schemes.
Any tips?
On device URL schemes would not uniquely identify your device. You would need to use a web facing service to push something to your device. Shortcuts can’t be triggered automatically - there is alway user intervention to manually trigger.
A workaround could be that you have a dedicated shortcut that runs constantly in the background, looking for a file change which could be actioned by a web service, which could be triggered by the flick. But this approach does lock up your use of Shortcuts and with the constant running will notably impact your battery life. Far from ideal.
Maybe take a step back and look at what the overall aim is for your shortcut. Maybe there’s a better way to trigger it than the flick, or maybe the flick could trigger something that isn’t a shortcut that could achieve the same outcome?
My short term success criteria is to start a Clock countdown (timer) with a given time (e.g. 15 minutes) by clicking the flic button. I do not want to use some random timer app (or indeed flic’s built-in Timer) since I need the timer available from any iOS device - and visible on my Watch Siri face.
Long term this is a part of a bigger setup, I’m building, hence the desire to make it trigger a shortcut 
Short term - use voice activation of Siri with your watch.
Longer term - maybe iOS13 and Shortcuts updates will give you some better options?
Not gonna happen - I hate voice commands in general, and since this particular flow should run multiple times a day in a large group of people, it’s a no-go 
There’s nothing (right now) that will do this entirely automatically. What you can do is have Flic trigger Pushcut or another similar solution and run the shortcut from the notification yourself.
Which is where this came in…
The iOS security model simply isn’t geared up to receive and act on external triggers without user intervention. The only “kind of” exceptions I can think of are:
- A phone call where the call does trigger an action; the phone app makes a sound and changes the user interface. But even then, to do anything further requires user action.
- A remote ping and wipe by find my iPhone or an MDM solution.
Certainly there are no fully automated dynamic actions on a locked (non-jail-broken) iOS device.
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I’ve found my Cronios shortcut doesn’t impact battery life as much as one would think it does. If your scheduled shortcut isn’t doing anything major (like checking location every minute), battery life shouldn’t be a big problem.
Or, you can use something like WatchCuts along with Cronios to trigger the shortcut to run from your Apple Watch, Mac, or other iCloud-connected device.
With the Flic button, you’d have it set a flag on Dropbox. The scheduled shortcut would read it, do its thing, and reset the flag.
Thanks. Probably too many dependencies, but this could be a backup plan I’ll investigate a bit.
Released NotesCuts today. Check it out:
Self-contained, so it doesn’t need Cronios. Can check more frequently than a minute, which is good if you’re pressing that Flic button a lot. Let me know what you think.