By Dan Moren for Macworld

October 5, 2020 5:36 AM PT

How Apple can power up automation on its platforms

The great joy of technology is in what it can do for us—especially those tasks that we don’t want to spend our own precious time on. Over the last few years, Apple has taken strides to bring automation capabilities to iOS in a variety of forms, including HomeKit and, more recently, Shortcuts.

But, as good as those options are, there are still places where they fall short of what we could have. Certainly, there are third-party offerings that can help bridge the divide, but given what Apple has already built into its operating system, it seems like a few improvements could go a long way to making its innate automation more capable right out of the box.

Recently, I’ve been spending more time exploring the powers of Apple’s automation features, and while they truly do enable you to create some marvelous inventions, for every clever creation, there’s an equal and opposite amount of frustration at what they can’t quite do yet.

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