Want time-based, confirmation-free shortcut to run

#1

Here’s the behavior I’m trying to get: every day at 8 pm, I want my iPhone to check my calendar, and if i have a trip the next day, I want my phone to mark all the items on a Reminders packing list as undone and display the weather at my destination. If the phone doesn’t find a calendar event for a trip, then the phone does nothing. That is, I don’t want to hear or see anything from it at all.

Right now, I have a Shortcut that checks my calendar, clears my packing list (with the help of Scriptable to mark the reminders as undone), and displays the weather at the destination shown in my calendar. I made an automation within Shortcuts to run this every day at 8 pm, but I get a notification from Shortcuts every day at 8 pm asking if it can run this automation. I don’t want that. My script exits silently if it doesn’t find a trip in my calendar.

I looked at Pushcut, and I was intrigued by the background triggers, but those only seem to be based on location and not on time alone. The foreground trigger has a pure time-based trigger, but the docs say I’ll get a notification which I must tap to run the shortcut.

I’m hoping there’s a way to trigger a shortcut with no user confirmation at a specified time. I know that Shortcuts has some confirmation-less triggers like tapping on an NFC tag, but I want it just to be time based. An alarm can trigger an automation without confirmation, but only when it’s snoozed or stopped—again, unwanted user interaction from me.

-Eric

#2

All Shortcuts require user interaction to run – either in the form of doing something to run it (silence an alarm/tap an NFC tag/open an app) or a confirmation of a notification (which time based triggers falls under).

There is a Shortcut from Adam Tow @adamtow called AutoCuts Suite available on GitHub that allows Shortcuts to effectively run in the background. The documentation gives details of how it works and what to expect.

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#3

If you have a spare iPhone or iPad you could use the Pushcut automation sever to run this.

Or assuming you use an alarm every day you could tie this to the alarm being turned off.

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#4

The interesting question is what a “spare iPhone/iPad” actually is. It turns out to be slightly more liberal a definition than the name suggests.

For example, I’m using my work/old iPhone 7. I’m pretty sure it’s generating notifications in the background and still the Automation Server keeps running. So that’s no my definition of “spare”.

BTW purchasing secondhand iPhones capable of running iOS 12 turns out to be quite expensive.

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#5

What Tony said. The only caveat with Autocuts is that you have to “use” your iPhone in order to trigger the shortcut to run after 8:00 am. The automatic running of shortcuts via Autocuts happens via the Open App personal automation.

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#6

FYI: There’s now a jailbreak solution for running automations automatically.

I haven’t jailbroken my devices in years, so I don’t know the efficacy of this solution. Just putting it out there for you as a possible alternative.

#7

Thanks for all the replies. I’ve decided nothing really gets me what I want at present, so I sent feedback to Apple and will wait for a first-party solution.

#8

not first party (or even shortcuts), but I have a few home automations setup on a timer in the home app that turns on/off a dummy switch via homebridge. The switch then fires off the appropriate script on the homebridge device (mine is a raspberry pi).

definitely hacky, but it’s gotten the job done “no interaction on a schedule” (the script makes a few simple http calls to my Sonos speakers to get some morning music playing). When the switch is turned off by the automation, it runs another script which tells Sonos to stop playing.

theoretically, you could run homebridge on a Mac, and have it run an applescript and send the output back to you via an iCloud document or iMessage?