iPhone Action button shortcuts: Unlock new customizations

You can go beyond the basics if you customize the iPhone’s Action button with shortcuts. You can make a fart sound, or get ChatGPT to help you write an email, or just about anything else you dream up.

Apple lets you assign the iPhone’s Action button to one of eight preassigned things — but if you choose Shortcut, you can do much more. Shortcuts offer a way to reach inside an app and automatically run a feature without opening it. With the iPhone 16’s Action button, you have a physical button you can press no matter what you’re doing on your phone, adding quick access to custom actions.

Some power users use the Action button to do incredibly useful (or frivolous) things. I’ll show you how to do the same — and also how you can trick your phone into assigning two or more shortcuts to the single Action button.

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8 cool things you can do with iPhone Action button shortcuts

After Apple introduced the Action button on the iPhone 15 Pro in 2023, enterprising users quickly came up with a wide variety of shortcuts they assigned to it. You’re really only limited by your imagination — or your ability to ferret out useful shortcuts that other people created. (MacStories‘ shortcuts archive is a great place to start.)

Once you assign a shortcut to the iPhone’s Action button, you can quickly execute its function with a quick press of the button. (You will find the Action button just above the volume up/down buttons on iPhone 16 — a location some people find inconvenient.)

So, need some inspiration? Here’s a roundup of the coolest shortcuts I’ve found to add to the iPhone’s Action button:

1. Trigger Google Assistant and/or Amazon Alexa
2. Add to grocery list
3. Talk to ChatGPT
4. Call/text someone
5. Lock/unlock your house or car with your iPhone’s Action button
6. File scanner
7. Page turn button in Books
8. Play a sound effect

Note: After setting up any of these shortcuts, you will need to assign it to your iPhone’s Action button. Do that by opening the Settings app and tapping Action Button. This will open an unusual picker. Swipe through the stock options until you get to Shortcut, then tap the Choose a Shortcut button to open the Shortcuts app. Then tap the shortcut you want to assign to your iPhone’s Action button.

1. Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa

If you take issue with Siri’s often unhelpful responses to basic questions, you’ve previously had no other option. Siri has system-wide access by holding down the side button; all the other voice assistants need to be launched from an app.

With the Action button, other, more powerful voice assistants can be accessed just as easily.

Download Google Assistant from the App Store. Then, open the Shortcuts app. Tap + in the upper right. Tap Add Action and search for Ask Google. In the end, you should have a Shortcut with just that one action, like the screenshot above.

The Amazon Alexa app doesn’t have a Shortcuts action. Instead, you can choose Open App and set it to open the Alexa app. This adds an extra step as you need to button press and then tap on the screen to ask, but if you’re good friends with Alexa, it’s better than nothing.

Assign the Action button to your new shortcut, and voila! Your preferred assistant is just a button press away. No longer do you need to suffer through Siri.

2. Add to grocery list

Imagine this scenario: You’re in the pantry or you’re cooking and you think, “Oh, I should add this to the grocery list.” Naturally, since you’re in the middle of something else, the missing ingredient never gets added. You don’t want to interrupt yourself and pull your phone out, unlock it, open the  Reminders app, open your list and type it in.

Well, you can assign this task to the Action button. Just open the Shortcuts app and create a shortcut with the Add New Reminder action. Tap Reminder, tap Ask Each Time and then tap to specify your grocery list. (Don’t forget to convert your Reminders list into a grocery list so it will automatically categorize items.)

3. Talk to ChatGPT

You don’t need to wait for Apple Intelligence to give ChatGPT prime placement on your iPhone 15 Pro. With the S-GPT shortcut, you can summarize websites you’re looking at, make an Apple Music playlist and recommend when to schedule events based on your calendar data. You also can use ChatGPT’s conversational interface to help you write emails and ask for information — the kind of stuff OpenAI’s chatbot is known for.

Earlier this year, Federico Viticci from MacStories made a small ChatGPT client that runs inside a shortcut. You can download it here. You will need to set it up by creating an API key and plugging that into the Shortcut, but Viticci has detailed instructions.

After you set it up, assign it to your iPhone’s Action button, and you can get the power of ChatGPT at the press of a button.

4. Call/text someone

If you need the fastest possible way to text your partner, you can make a button for it. First, open the Shortcuts app and create a shortcut with the Send Message action. Tap Message, then tap Ask Each Time. Tap Recipients, then enter in the contact name(s) and tap Done. (If you want the button to make a call or start FaceTime, choose the Call or FaceTime action instead, and then pick the contact you want.)

Assign your new shortcut to the Action button and you can shoot a text at the push of a button.

5. Lock/Unlock your house or car with your iPhone Action button

If you own a smart home lock or an app-connected car, you can set your Action button to lock and unlock your door. If your smart lock is HomeKit-compatible, and is connected to the Home app, it’s really easy. Just open the Shortcuts app and create a new shortcut. Add the Control My Home action and select the device you want to automate. Other smart device-specific apps may offer Shortcuts support, too — tap the Apps tab to see if there’s an automation for it.

Tesla supports shortcuts too; look for the Lock/Unlock action when creating your shortcut.

6. File Scanner

The iPhone’s high-resolution camera is more than sufficient for scanning in basic documents without going through the rigmarole of using a printer/scanner. If this is an essential part of your daily work, you can launch the file scanner in the Files app from the Action button.

Create a Shortcut with the Scan Document action from the Files app. It’s incredibly fast and easy to capture multi-page documents, get a PDF out of it, give it a file name and throw it in iCloud Drive. (And from there, you can email or upload it to a different service of your choice.)

If you didn’t know about this feature, you can access it inside the Files app, too. Just hit ⋯ > Scan Documents.

7. Page Turn button in Books

Dedicated e-book readers like the Kindle and Kobo have physical page-turn buttons, but the iPhone, of course, does not. Unless you have an iPhone 15 Pro. If you want to add one, open the Shortcuts app. Then create a shortcut and add the Turn Page action from the Books app. Then assign your new shortcut to the Action button. You now have a physical page-turn button on your iPhone. (If you click the button when you’re not reading a book, it’ll open the Books app.)

If you’re a big reader, this could be a game changer for reading on your phone.

8. Play a sound effect with your iPhone action button

If you want to turn your Action button into a noisemaker, download the Thwip soundboard app from the App Store (free, no in-app purchases, no tracking data). Then you can assign the Action button to play a sound effect of your choosing. Thwip comes with several standards: a rim shot, sad trombone, laugh track, crickets, bell, air horn, etc. You can even upload your own audio files.

Then, open the Shortcuts app and create a shortcut using the Play Sound action. Type in the name of the sound you want to trigger, and assign it to your Action button for sound effects on demand.

Add multiple shortcuts to your iPhone 15 Pro’s Action button

As you can see, assigning the Shortcut option for your iPhone’s Action button opens up a world of possibilities. If you can’t settle on just one shortcut to trigger, the following workarounds let you add even more shortcuts to the Action button.

Table of contents: Add multiple shortcuts to the iPhone’s Action button

Run different actions in portrait and landscape

This is a cool trick you can enable with a little bit of setup. When you hold your phone vertically you can launch one Shortcut, and when you hold it horizontally, you can do something else, like launch the Camera — or any app you may already want to use horizontally. For example, in vertical, you can send a text message; in horizontal, you can launch a game.

First, you need to download Actions from the App Store. It’s free with no in-app purchases and has a clean privacy report. This app is what you need to figure out your phone orientation.

Second, download this Shortcut I made. (It’s important you have the app downloaded before you get the Shortcut.) My “Phone Orientation” shortcut is annotated with comments that make it easy for you to assign different actions in the vertical and horizontal orientation.

By default, clicking the button vertically will turn on the flashlight, and clicking the button horizontally will open the Camera. To change either of these, tap the × to remove the action, add another from the search field and drag it underneath the comment block.

Finally, assign Phone Orientation to your Action button.

Add a ‘double click’ for a second shortcut

What if you can’t decide on just one thing?

The MultiButton shortcut from Federico Viticci (yes, him again) lets you assign two shortcuts at once. If you click your iPhone 15 Pro’s Action button once, it runs the first shortcut. If you click it a second time within a few seconds, it’ll launch a second shortcut of your choosing. You could easily use MultiButton as an app launcher for two different apps you might like to toggle between: Mastodon and Twitter, Camera and Photos, Safari and Notes, etc.

Viticci wrote up detailed instructions on MacStories about how to set up this madness after you download the sMultiButton shortcut.

For extra credit, try and combine MultiButton with Phone Orientation to pack four features into the same button. When your phone is vertical, you can click once to compose a text and click twice to place a phone call; when your phone is held horizontally, you can toggle between Apple’s Camera app and another like Halide.

Pick from a list

If those automations are a bit much for you, you can pare things down to a simple list of shortcuts. Then, when you press the Action button, you can simply choose from a menu of what to do next.

To set this up, create a shortcut and tap Add Action. Tap Scripting and pick Choose from Menu. Give each item in the list a name in the block on top; add more choices by tapping + Add new item. Below that, add the actions you want and drag them underneath each section. You can even launch another shortcut using the Run Shortcut action if you want a button for one of the shortcuts I’ve linked to above.

If you like four or more of the options above, you can add every single one of them to the menu for easy access when you press the Action button. You also might want more specificity — instead of using Apple’s Camera shortcut, you can build a menu with shortcuts to specific camera modes, like Photo, Portrait, Video, Selfie instead of picking just one.

Have more iPhone Action button ideas?

Tell us what you’re using the Action button for! We’re on Facebook, X, Mastodon and Threads.

We originally published this article on the iPhone 15 Pro’s Action button on September 30, 2023. We updated the information.