[Tip] iOS 18 compatibility of date comparisons

Shortcuts
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Some date comparisons in your shortcuts may have to be revised to ensure compatibility on all iOS versions.

Up until iOS 17, the ‘If’ action has had these conditions for date type:

  • has any value
  • does not have any value
  • is exactly
  • is not exactly
  • is after
  • is before
  • is today
  • is between
  • is in the next
  • is in the last

On the other hand, iOS 18 may use different conditions in some cases and will cause compatibility issues.

Date conditions

iOS 18 uses the same conditions for action dates such as ‘Date’ and ‘Get Dates from Input’. Parametric dates (dates from action parameters; such as start/end dates of calendar events, due date of reminders, creation date of files, date taken of images) have different conditions and act differently in the following cases:

iOS 18 action, iOS 17 iOS 18 parametric
is exactly is on
is not exactly is not on
is today not available

‘Is today’ is not supported and fails to run on iOS 18, producing the “Please choose a value for each parameter in this action” error.

‘Is (not) exactly’ on iOS 17 becomes ‘is (not) on’ on iOS 18, and vice versa. ‘Is (not) on’ only checks for date and ignores time. This means that shortcuts that contain any of the three conditions on parametric dates will run differently based on iOS version.

Note: Date conditions in find/filter actions are not affected. For example, ‘Start Date’ in ‘Find Calendar Events’ has the same set of conditions on all iOS versions.

Keeping compatibility

Making shortcuts run correctly across all iOS versions is not very difficult:

  • Do NOT use parametric dates in ‘is (not) exactly’, ‘is (not) on’, or ‘is today’ conditions
  • Instead, add ‘Get Dates from Input’ or ‘Date’ before the ‘If’ action to make them action dates

In short, compatibility can be assured by avoiding parametric dates for the above three conditions.

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