Like most Americans, I have an iPhone. I like the convenience of knowing any app I’ll ever need will always have a build for the platform, how reliably performant it is for daily tasks, and—to many’s surprise—the customizability of your phone.

The sun has long set on the days where iOS wouldn’t let you customize how your phone looked or behaved. Sure, the garden’s walls still stand strong, but they’ve been grown over by ivy, enhancing the illusion you are free in a wild space. You can customize your icon colors, put apps and widgets anywhere you’d like on the screen, have multiple Home Screens that automatically cycle based on time, location, or any other parameter. You can even program your phone’s behavior using Shortcuts.

I love shortcuts. They’re perfectly accessible for anyone, despite being one of the most powerful tools on your iPhone. You can automate and actuate almost any action between apps by dragging and dropping different functions supplied by iOS and any app. Siri also supports shortcuts. Just say, “Hey Siri, ‘your shortcut’s name here’” and dingus will perform the preprogrammed action.

I use shortcuts to solve my biggest pain points with having a modern phone. Namely, being accessible all the time even to people who I wish wouldn’t contact me. My phone is inundated by spam calls daily. I’ve had to turn on silence unknown callers and for years, whenever I was expecting a call from a strange number, like in March when I had to get my fridge replaced and be delivery driver gave me a wide delivery window, I’ve had to turn it off manually. I usually forget to turn it back on, meaning the next day I’ll inevitably get exposed to the harassing calls of low life scammers.

It took me a while to figure out how, but I created a shortcut to lets me snooze silence unknown callers for a custom duration of minutes. You just run the shortcuts, type in a duration and after it expires silence unknown callers will be reenabled. It’s great to alleviate the stress of waiting for a call while still preventing the stress of receiving unwanted calls.

My favorite part of Shortcuts is that you can share them. Here’s the shortcut I was just telling you about.

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/3fa52e55e18e413f941865d97a7c9cad

You can install it on your phone and enjoy the benefits! It’s just a link to metadata that allows your phone to reconstruct the shortcut. It’s a satisfying programmatic solution for advanced iPhone users that doesn’t require me to pull up an IDE.

As a lifetime iOS user, who has dabbled in Android a few times, I fail to see how Android can be any more customizable without requiring technical skills. Obviously, Android is not as restrictive. You can modify it a lot more with different launchers, install different app stores, etc. but for most people, I think they’ll only use the customization options of their current launcher, and iOS has more than enough. Not to mention Android has no Shortcuts competitor. I think you can create automations with Google Assistant, but that’s becoming Gemini? I don’t know. I’m out of my depth on this topic.