Six essential iOS Shortcuts for Apple Watch — that also work on Cellular connection
Ever since I got my Apple Watch with LTE, I wanted to leave my iPhone at home as often as possible while still being connected and able to do the most important tasks from the Watch.
Spotify, Apple Pay, iMessage, Maps and the occasional Phone call already worked perfectly even when the Watch is not connected to the iPhone, but I was still missing a couple of Apps…
Recently I found out, that the iOS Shortcuts App is indeed a perfect companion for Apple Watch users — unleashing the full potential and often filling the gap that the Apple Watch unfortunately doesn’t support out of the box.
The iOS Shortcuts App is indeed a perfect companion for Apple Watch users
Here are my 5 favorite iOS Shortcuts (including download links) that I created for my Apple Watch — all of them even working when the Apple Watch is only connected to LTE, and not connected to the iPhone.
- ChatGPT
Everyone’s talking about it at the moment — and now you can even use it from your wrist. Link to the shortcut is found on my article about how to set it up (as you still need to fill in your API key from OpenAI!)
2. Create new note in iOS Notes App
Unfortunately, the Apple Watch does not have a companion App for their native iOS Notes App… but you can use the following shortcut here to at least create a new Note from your Watch.
3. Send a WhatsApp Message
Also WhatsApp does not have an official App for Apple Watch and even though there are some 3rd party apps for WhatsApp, none of them work when then Apple Watch is only connected to LTE and not connected to the iPhone — so quite useless.
I built a very simple shortcut that allows you to initiate a WhatsApp message from your Apple Watch to a contact in your contact list. Here’s the link. I also recommend reading my article here about a more elaborate shortcut for WhatsApp.
4. RSS Feed
If you also prefer reading news through an RSS reader, here’s a shortcut that you can use to configure your favorite feed. When selecting an article, it opens it in the built-in browser.
5. Web Browser
The name says it, this shortcut allows you to enter a URL on your Apple Watch and display the content in the built-in browser.
I don’t fully understand why Apple does not support this out of the box. I recommend extending this shortcut to improve your experience by e.g. pre-filling your favorite URLs into a menu that opens when you launch this shortcut.
6. Apple Watch Health Shortcut
I’ve created a Shortcut for Apple Watch that allows you to view the history of the following Health data directly on your Apple Watch (depending on your model):
- 🌡️ Wrist Temperature
- 🩸 Blood Oxygen
- 🫁 Respiratory Rate
- 🧍 Stand Minutes
- 🏃 Exercise Minutes
- 🫀 Cardio Fitness
- ⚡️ Active Energy
- ❤️ Heart Rate Variability
- 🪜 Flights climbed
- 🚲 Cycling distance
You can download the Shortcut via this link.
I hope you enjoyed my list of Shortcuts. Please leave a comment down below if you have any questions, recommendations or any other feedback!
If this article helped you, I’d appreciate a little tip (see link down below). Thanks!
