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jay968

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Apr 2, 2019
464
269
California
WHY OH WHY is it that every time Apple decides to come out with something upgraded they have to change the way we are used to doing things into something either bizarre or useless that takes days to figure out how to undo?

Today I looked at my iphone with ios 18.3.1 (which I mistakenly upgraded to yesterday) and I no longer saw the shortcuts that I had created months ago for various things on the phone, and instead I now see shortcuts that I had created for automating the opening and closing of some apps on my Mac Mini! I no longer see any of the phone's shortcuts at all.

After researching, I have turned off icloud sharing on the phone, on the mac mini and I also went into the shortcut app on the phone to removed the new shortcuts and replace them with the old shortcuts that I had set up for the phone. Can I do this? Of course not. All those shortcuts are no longer listed in the shortcut app on the phone! Of course they are listed inside the shortcut app on the mac mini, but not on the phone's shortcut app where they should be!

Can anyone help? Contrary to what Apple may think, I do NOT want my desktop apps to have a shortcut to them on the phone, and I do not want my mac mini to have shortcut to my phone's shortcuts! Again I THINK I have turned off icloud sharing of these shortcuts in both the phone and the mac mini, but they still show up on the phone and the phone's shortcuts are gone!

Infuriating!
 
WHY OH WHY is it that every time Apple decides to come out with something upgraded they have to change the way we are used to doing things into something either bizarre or useless that takes days to figure out how to undo?

Today I looked at my iphone with ios 18.3.1 (which I mistakenly upgraded to yesterday) and I no longer saw the shortcuts that I had created months ago for various things on the phone, and instead I now see shortcuts that I had created for automating the opening and closing of some apps on my Mac Mini! I no longer see any of the phone's shortcuts at all.

After researching, I have turned off icloud sharing on the phone, on the mac mini and I also went into the shortcut app on the phone to removed the new shortcuts and replace them with the old shortcuts that I had set up for the phone. Can I do this? Of course not. All those shortcuts are no longer listed in the shortcut app on the phone! Of course they are listed inside the shortcut app on the mac mini, but not on the phone's shortcut app where they should be!

Can anyone help? Contrary to what Apple may think, I do NOT want my desktop apps to have a shortcut to them on the phone, and I do not want my mac mini to have shortcut to my phone's shortcuts! Again I THINK I have turned off icloud sharing of these shortcuts in both the phone and the mac mini, but they still show up on the phone and the phone's shortcuts are gone!

Infuriating!
No responses, hmmm

Well, I ended up just removing the widget that I had created and put new shortcuts onto the home screen for the things on the phone that I had wanted automated. The widget that I had originally created is still there within the shortcuts but it has both these shortcuts and the ones that I had created for my mac mini. All I can do is delete that entire widget and create new ones for the shortcuts that I now have on the phone's home screen.
Very strange.
 
Yeah sharing shortcuts between iOS and macOS doesn't make sense…I saw that right away.

Also…where are the iOS-style Shortcut automations in macOS? Not really there.
 
Have not seen this myself, and I have synching turned on all platforms: I have some Shortcuts that can run on all platforms. I have seen "Which version to keep" messages when I make a change on Mac and then make a change to the change on say the phone, so synching isn't always smooth.

I've been backing up my Shortcuts for quite a while now as I have fat fingered something from time to time so nice to have an old version to restore. Long story short, I have a bunch of Shortcut code to do full backups and deltas, but one can do it with three lines of code. And could be adapted to run on a schedule via Automations.

Save File.png
 
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Well here are some new ones:
My iphone will no longer connect via bluetooth to my car's bluetooth, nor will it connect to my Airpods Max headphones.
Nor will my Macbook air connect to the headphones.
It's almost as if my entire Apple ecosystem bluetooth is somehow screwed up.
I say ALMOST because my Mac Mini still works with my magic mouse and bluetooth keyboard. I can also use iphone mirroring with it.
Not sure what is going on but all of this started when I upgraded to ios 18.3.1

Yeah sharing shortcuts between iOS and macOS doesn't make sense…I saw that right away.

Also…where are the iOS-style Shortcut automations in macOS? Not really there.
Open the shortcuts app in your applications folder. You should see any shortcuts you have created there.
 
So I believe I have figured out the issue and have gotten pretty much everything back to normal.

I originally had a widget on my phone containing several commands (turn WiFi on/off, turn bluetooth on/off etc).
I also created a couple of shortcuts on my mac mini, but after updating the phone to 18.3.1, these shortcuts appeared in a new widget on my phone in place of the original one which was nowhere to be found.
I googled this and saw that this was because I had icloud sharing for the shortcuts app turned on. It was suggested I turn this off on all my devices.

Well I did that, but for some reason doing so turned off bluetooth connectivity. I could not pair anything to anything, not even my phone to my car's audio system!
Not sure what bluetooth connectivity has to do with icloud connectivity in the shortcuts app, but when I turned that back on in all my devices, everything worked again!
The new phone widget did not get fixed, but I just removed it from my home screen and put individual shortcut icons in its place. So now, the mac mini shortcuts don't show up on the phone anymore.

Things like this drive me insane and are a good example of tech just getting too advanced for its own good. i am not a believer in, "lets implement this because we can" kind of mentality, especially when the companies just take it upon themselves to do so without notice or an option to NOT allow such things. It almost seems that with every update these days, I've got to spend a few days undoing things that the updates had done without my knowledge.

Anyway, I thought I'd post this just in case anyone reading here was still wondering what the issue was cause by.
 
I also created a couple of shortcuts on my mac mini, but after updating the phone to 18.3.1, these shortcuts appeared in a new widget on my phone in place of the original one

Could be a problem with the Widget and where you put the new Shortcuts. It happens to me from time to time but never lose anything.

Press-hold the Widget and should see which folder it’s using to fill the Widget. By default, All Shorcuts is used, and if you do not organize the Shortcuts into folders, new stuff winds up on top.

For example, on my phone I have a folder Main with the Shortcuts I want in the Widget. If I set my Widget to All and create a new Shortcut, it will push one of the Main Shortcuts over the edge.

I1.png


I2.png
 
Could be a problem with the Widget and where you put the new Shortcuts. It happens to me from time to time but never lose anything.

Press-hold the Widget and should see which folder it’s using to fill the Widget. By default, All Shorcuts is used, and if you do not organize the Shortcuts into folders, new stuff winds up on top.

For example, on my phone I have a folder Main with the Shortcuts I want in the Widget. If I set my Widget to All and create a new Shortcut, it will push one of the Main Shortcuts over the edge.

View attachment 2487581


View attachment 2487582
Thanks. This could very well have been the problem as I do have everything in the same folder.
I'll try and create a new folder in order to separate them.
 
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