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Comment by bossyTeacher | Hacker News Reader

Which afaik is something that has been in Android for ages. What's so special about the iOs implementation?

Shortcuts is about a decade old and was acquired by Apple 8 years ago. It has hooks into the OS and allows apps to expose their own hooks for automation.

Are you looking for a real answer or is this some weird defensive Android thing in response to someone describing the existence of an Apple feature?

Not sure what makes you think I was on the defensive, I asked a question. I am a regular user of both operating systems so I have no 'team' nor am I an iOs hater.

A similar app has existed for Android for about 15 years at a time when nothing like that existed for iOs. It was actually used by Google to showcase Android's potential for automation in contrast to iOs which had nothing like that at the time.

Does Android have it? Some Googling tells me it has third party apps which enable it but no built-in equivalent.

Yeah the closest thing I recall using is tasker but that relies on mostly private intents, the nice thing with shortcuts is it uses the same intents developers use for things like Siri Shortcuts so there’s first class support

Well, the first app of this kinda was in Android. About 5 years before Shortcuts iirc. Most people on here seem to be iOs users so they are not aware of it

Yeah but it was third-party right?

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