How can I tell which of my apps are even supposed to show App Shortcuts, before I blame an update for removing them? Search & Spotlight
Follow-up to the two threads below, and the thing I wish someone had told me first.
After chasing missing shortcuts for a day I realised I did not actually know which apps ever had them. I was comparing what I saw today against a memory of what search looked like a month ago, which is not evidence of anything.
So: is there a reliable way to check whether a given app ships shortcuts at all? Something I can look at that does not depend on remembering, and does not require the search index to be healthy: because if the index is the broken thing, using search to test it is circular.
What I would like to end up with is a short list of the apps on my phone that genuinely offer actions, so that next time I can tell in a minute whether something is missing or whether I imagined it.
@appintents_ada · last mo. · 4 replies
Yes, and the check does not touch search at all.
Open the Shortcuts app, start a new shortcut, and browse the actions by app. Everything an app has published is listed there. The set that shows up in Spotlight under an app name is drawn from a small subset the developer marked as the headline ones, but the important part for your purpose is the top-level question: if an app has nothing in Shortcuts, it has nothing to show in search either, and it never did.
That gives you the list you asked for, it is honest about apps you have never opened, and it works when search itself is misbehaving. It also has a pleasant side effect - most people discover two or three actions in apps they use daily that they had no idea existed.
One caveat so the list is not misleading: an app can publish actions for the Shortcuts editor without marking any as headline actions. Those are real and usable, they will just never appear under the app in search. So Shortcuts-empty means search-empty, but Shortcuts-has-things does not guarantee search-has-things.
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@shortcuts_power · 4w ago · 2 replies
The browse-by-app check is the right answer and there is a detail that makes it more reliable: an app can declare actions and still show nothing in search, because the two systems are populated separately.
So the action list is the truth about what the app offers, and search is a separate index that can be stale or incomplete. People conclude an app lost its features when what actually broke is the index.
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@appintents_ada · 3w ago
Two systems, one of which is a cache, and only one of them is authoritative. That is the whole confusion.
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@home_screen_hal · last mo.
This answers the thing that was bothering me in my own thread. I assumed every app with a Shortcuts action should show something under its name in search, and when a few did not I counted them as casualties.
Checked six apps. Two of them have plenty in the Shortcuts editor and have simply never offered anything in search, on any version. So part of what I called a regression was me being wrong about the baseline.
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