The Action Button

I have like 6 things half drafted but none ready enough to publish within this arbitrary schedule I set for myself so this'll have to do

The Action Button on the iPhone 15 Pro (and I think on all iPhone 16s? Maybe?) is Very Good and I use it literally every single day (often multiple times per day.) How do I use it, you may ask?

By having it mapped to an insane and overcomplicated series of nested shortcuts that does the following:

1. Checks which Focus Mode I’m in:

   1. If I’m in my theme park or travel focus -> it opens the camera

   2. If I’m in my sleep focus

      1. Add 30 minutes onto my Overcast sleep timer¹

      2. Toggle playback

2. Otherwise, if I’m in none of those focuses

   1. It checks if I’m within 100 meters of the ~5 or so grocery stores I go to regularly

      1. If so, it opens my grocery list in Reminders

   2. Otherwise it runs another shortcut that brings up a selector to pick which headphones to connect

insane, lol

This specific one is overcomplicated but I do think highlights how the Action Button is useful to me: what are things that I want to be able to do either many many times in a short period of time, or without looking at my phone screen, or both. The sleep mode one enables me to quickly add another 30 minutes on my sleep timer and keep playing if I can’t fall asleep without having to type in a password or blind myself at night, whereas the shopping list/camera ones are cases where I’m probably using the shortcut several times per hour (especially when shopping, probably like 20 times in any given grocery trip.)

The only one I’m not sold on is the final fallback where it opens my headphones shortcut. I should figure out a better option for that.

Anyway, next time someone says the Action Button is useless, show them this post! That’ll teach ‘em!

1. Hilariously, this means I use three different podcast apps currently: Pocket Casts is my preferred for day-to-day use, but it doesn’t have a sleep timer shortcut like Overcast, so Overcast is the sleep podcast app. And then neither have anywhere close to reliable offline Apple Watch playback, so the Apple Podcasts app is my app for podcasts when I’m running. Insane, it’s no way to live.