Yesterday Apple released iOS 14.6 and iPadOS 14.6 with several changes that improve Bluetooth connectivity and the unlock with Apple Watch feature. The update also preps iOS for next month’s addition of lossless audio and Spatial Audio for Apple Music, and allows Apple Card users to add as many as five more people to an account. It also improves the Shortcuts feature making it run faster on the iPhone and iPad.
Shortcuts allows users to get one or more tasks done using your apps. You can also create your own Shortcut such as the one Apple uses as an example. The tech giant says that you can create a “Surf Time” shortcut that captures the latest surf report, tells you the estimated time to the beach, and starts to play your surf music playlist.
Last year we told you about a Shortcut that starts doing its thing when you say “Hey Siri I’m getting pulled over.” In a series of 18 steps that were created by Robert A. Petersen, your iPhone camera will start recording video using the FaceTime camera in order to capture any confrontation with the cops. The phone’s display will dim to avoid any telltale sign that you are recording the incident, and it will also turn the volume off while sending a copy of the aforementioned video and your location to emergency contacts.
An action is a single step in a list of actions found in a Shortcut. In iOS 14.6 and iPadOS 14.6, actions run faster according to users posting comments on Reddit. The faster speeds are also noticeable in the iOS 14.7 beta.
For example, a Reddit user with the handle u/jasonefmonk wrote “Before this update it took a little over a second to run the “Night Mode” shortcut I made that contains only seven different simple Settings actions. I’ve noticed after the update that it now runs in approximately 1/4 second! It is very noticeable and a welcome fix for something that should be quite quick.”
Another Reddit user summed up the whole experience running Shortcuts after the iOS 14.6 update by saying, “Yes for me every shortcut runs noticeably faster. So nice.” Talk about a concise comment that gets right to the point! Lastly, Reddit subscriber MarshallBranin wrote, “Can confirm. My 700 action shortcut with web scraping runs in only 13 seconds. This is compared to ~30 seconds prior to 14.6/14.7.”
Apple didn’t mention anything about Shortcuts in the release notes for iOS 14.6 but it certainly seems that the update does impact the app.
