Shortcuts in iOS 27 finally sounds like it was built for the rest of us

Shortcuts has always been one of the most powerful apps Apple ships on the iPhone, and one of the least understood. A new Bloomberg report says iOS 27 is about to change that with a single prompt: "What do you want your shortcut to do?" Honestly, that one question might be the most important thing Apple does for Shortcuts since acquiring Workflow in 2017.

What the new report says

The reporting comes from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, picked up by 9to5Mac on Monday. Apple is testing a rebuilt Shortcuts app in iOS 27 that lets users describe an automation in plain language and have the system build it for them. From the report:

The version now in testing lets users create shortcuts simply by describing what they want them to do. Currently, users need to manually build shortcuts within the app or download them from Apple's gallery. In the updated app, users are presented with a prompt asking, "What do you want your shortcut to do?" along with a text field to describe the request. The system then automatically builds and installs the shortcut on the device.

The same report points to a more discoverable Writing Tools experience, a new Grammarly style grammar checker, and AI generated wallpapers built on Image Playground. All of that is interesting, but the Shortcuts change is the one I keep coming back to.

Why this matters more than it might sound

Here's the thing: Shortcuts is already incredibly powerful. If you've ever watched what Federico Viticci at MacStories or Stephen Robles can do with it, you know there's almost no limit to what you can string together once you understand how the actions, variables, and inputs fit together.

But that "once you understand" has always been the catch. For most iPhone, iPad, and Mac owners, building a shortcut from scratch is more like writing a small program than using an app. You're picking actions from a long list, figuring out what each one outputs, and then routing that output into the next action. It's not impossible to learn, but it absolutely is intimidating. And the people who could probably benefit the most from a custom workflow are exactly the ones least likely to sit down and learn how to make one.

A plain language prompt collapses that whole problem. Instead of learning the app, you just describe what you want. "When I get a text from my wife with an address, open it in Maps and start directions." "Every Sunday night, copy my favorite photos from this week into a shared album." That's the kind of thing a regular user can articulate easily. They've just never had a way to tell the iPhone to do it.

The Apple Intelligence connection

What excites me is that this feels like the first time Apple Intelligence is being applied to something where the win is genuinely obvious. A lot of the AI features Apple has shipped so far have been small additions to apps you already use. Useful, but easy to overlook. Turning Shortcuts into something you can talk to is different. It takes a feature that has objectively been hard to use and makes it accessible in a way nothing else really has.

It also lines up with where Apple has been telling us the future of iOS is going. Apple already laid the groundwork in iOS 26 by letting Shortcuts tap into Apple Intelligence models for things like summaries and writing tasks. iOS 27 looks like it takes the next step and points Apple Intelligence at Shortcuts itself.

That said, the proof will be in how well it actually works. Natural language generation of automations is hard, and the worst version of this feature is one that confidently builds a shortcut that does almost what you asked for. I'm cautiously optimistic here, because Shortcuts is a structured environment with a defined set of actions, which is exactly the kind of constrained problem these models are good at. But I'll wait to see it in real use before celebrating too loudly.

What I'm watching for at WWDC

WWDC 2026 kicks off in just a few weeks, and assuming Bloomberg's reporting holds up, Apple's Shortcuts demo is going to be one of the moments I pay closest attention to. A few things I'll be looking for:

• How forgiving is the prompt? Can you describe a workflow loosely and get something workable, or do you still need to think like a programmer?
• Can you edit what it generates? Sometimes the best path is "have AI rough it in, then tweak it." That's where this gets really useful.
• Does it work offline, or does every request hit the cloud? On device handling would say something about how seriously Apple is treating this.

Bottom line: if Apple ships this the way it's being described, Shortcuts could finally graduate from "powerful tool for power users" to "the way you tell your iPhone to do the stuff it doesn't already do." That's a much bigger deal than a new wallpaper feature, and I'm here for it.

What about you? Is a plain language Shortcuts app enough to get you to finally use it? Let me know in the comments.

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