iOS 27 lets notifications from any app trigger a shortcut. These ten examples turn notification content into urgency alerts, dynamic wallpapers, summaries, translations, expense entries, scheduled messages, and cross-brand smart-home actions.
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Editor’s note: A version of this article by 谷雨G2rain appears on October 5, 2026 on SSPAI with the title “十个案例助你轻松上手 iOS 27 通知自动化”. Translated and published by agreement.
With iOS 27 now rolling out, it’s a good time to look at one of its new features: notification automations.
When Shortcuts first added file automations on the Mac, my mind immediately went to Folder Actions in Automator. At the time, I hoped its calendar alerts might eventually be folded into Shortcuts automations, so that calendar events or reminders could run shortcuts automatically.
Instead, Apple went a step further and added notification automations. They aren’t limited to system content from Calendar, Reminders, Mail, or Messages: any app that can send a notification can now serve as a Shortcuts trigger. That means even notifications from a frequently used app like WeChat can become an entry point for automation. More importantly, just like messages and emails, notifications carry custom content that can be filtered and processed. A shortcut can perform different actions depending on what an app sends.
Different apps can alert you in different ways. Different contacts can have different levels of urgency. Different notification content can trigger entirely different actions.
So while notification automation may look like just one more trigger, it actually introduces an entire new layer of usable input.
To use a notification automation, you must enable system notifications for the app and select at least one of Lock Screen or Notification Center as a notification destination. Selecting Banners alone will not allow the automation to run.
How notification automations work
The basic logic is simple: run a shortcut whenever a notification arrives from a specified app.
At present, you can filter notifications using three main fields:
- Title
- Subtitle
- Message
Adding filters lets you target a specific notification more precisely. When you add more than one filter, a notification must satisfy all of them, rather than merely one, to run the shortcut. In a WeChat notification, for example, the title is the contact name you have saved, while the message contains the text they sent. The automation will run only when that contact sends a message containing the specified text.
To identify the three fields, look at the notification as the app actually displays it. Line breaks and text hierarchy generally reveal which content is the title, subtitle, and message; the fields also use different font weights. If a notification appears on three lines, for example:
- First line = Title
- Second line = Subtitle
- Third line = Message
One detail can be confusing: the fields in an actual notification do not map neatly to those in Shortcuts’ “Show Notification” action. In the screenshot, the text entered in the action’s “Title” field appears on the second line of the resulting Shortcuts notification. For the purposes of a notification automation, it is therefore the subtitle; the shortcut’s name on the first line is the title.
A WeChat notification has two lines: the title and message. The saved contact name becomes the notification title, and the message they sent becomes the notification message.
When setting up a notification automation, it is therefore best to inspect the notification’s final displayed structure before deciding which fields to filter.
The automation’s Notification output variable exposes several details, including the app name, notification title, subtitle, message, and date. Each can serve as a condition for subsequent actions. Suppose, for example, that someone sends a WeChat message asking to register for an event, but the message arrives after the registration deadline. The shortcut could automatically send a custom reply.
Making notifications more noticeable
Until now, we have relied on the Lock Screen, Notification Center, banners, custom sounds, and app icon badges to deliver notification information. Notification automations let us add more dimensions: changing the wallpaper, playing a distinctive spoken message, or generating an extra vibration. They can also set an alarm, add a reminder, create a calendar event, or send a second alert after a delay.
01. Make important messages harder to miss
When a message arrives from a specific contact, record the time of that first message.
Every time another message arrives from the same person, compare the current time with the time of the first message recorded in Shortcuts Storage.
If more than 30 minutes have passed and you still haven’t opened the app or replied, you can reasonably conclude:
This person has tried to reach you several times over a fairly long period. It may genuinely be urgent.
At that point, an ordinary notification might no longer be enough.
The shortcut can switch to a more conspicuous wallpaper to strengthen the alert.
After you open the relevant app, an Open App automation can clear the stored message times and restore the original wallpaper.
There is one limitation: Shortcuts cannot actually determine whether you have read the message after opening the app. Opening the app can only serve as a proxy: open the app = assume you now know about the new message. The shortcut then automatically clears the stored times.
It is not true read detection, but it works well enough as an approximate reminder mechanism in everyday use.
Related shortcuts: Log Message Time | Clear Message Times
02. Keep badge alerts after changing an app icon
This is one situation in which a notification automation can stand in for a system notification.
When you use Shortcuts to give an app a custom icon, the app’s original badge stops working. If WeChat or another app receives a new unread message, the custom icon on your Home Screen cannot display the original red badge. From the Home Screen, you can no longer tell whether the app has any new messages. A notification automation can patch that gap.
When the selected app receives a notification, the automation retrieves information about the app. Based on the app icon’s position, the shortcut then dynamically overlays a badge on the current wallpaper.
The app icon itself has not changed, but the unread count is visually restored to its usual position.
Whenever WeChat receives a message, record the message count. If no value has been recorded, start at 1; otherwise, increment the existing total.
To reproduce the badge’s red circle and white text, store the red background image inside the shortcut as Base64. Shortcuts Storage in iOS 27 offers a more convenient approach, but Base64 is still used here so the shared shortcut works immediately. The examples below follow the same approach.
Overlay the accumulated message count on the red circle.
Expressions calculate the badge’s position on the wallpaper. You can adjust the values for different devices using a cropped screenshot. In the example, the badge belongs to the second icon in the third row. If the custom icon moves on the Home Screen, you must manually update its row and column in the shortcut.
After you open WeChat, an Open App automation removes the badge and regenerates the wallpaper without it.
This solution works best if you have only one Home Screen page. With multiple pages, or different icons for the same app on different pages, the visual can become misleading, because a badge baked into the wallpaper cannot know which page you are currently viewing.
It is only a workaround.
There is another, potentially more convenient method. At some point, Shortcuts added an “Add Shortcut to Home Screen” action.
In theory, you could use it to regenerate an icon with a badge effect.
Unfortunately, there is no convenient way to delete the icon afterward. Every newly generated icon adds another icon to the Home Screen. Paired with a notification automation that keeps generating them, this quickly creates a pile of duplicates.
Unlike the wallpaper approach, this method also cannot clean itself up when you open the app; you still have to delete the old icons manually.
For now, the wallpaper solution is more flexible. It may not be elegant, but it can generate and clear itself automatically without endlessly creating new app icons.
Related shortcuts: Simulate Badge | Clear Badge | Add Shortcut to Home Screen
03. Express notifications through color
If placing raw numbers on your wallpaper feels too crude, you can try a more ambient, abstract approach. It works especially well with solid-color or minimalist wallpapers.
Assign a representative color to each app in advance, or choose a theme color for each type of app. This example uses the RGBA values from the app icons themselves.
Whenever one of those apps receives a notification, the shortcut dynamically generates a new wallpaper.
Each color represents an app, and the more notifications an app has sent, the more area its color occupies. A concrete notification count becomes an abstract visual signal.
You no longer need to inspect every notification on the Lock Screen. The colors and their relative areas give you a rough sense of which apps have been most active recently. If one color suddenly dominates the wallpaper, that app has generated a large number of notifications. This may indicate an urgent situation that needs attention. It is far more noticeable than another item in a stack of Lock Screen notifications.
When a selected app sends a notification, record the app’s name.
Record the message count at the same time, using a combination that includes the app name as the lookup key.
Use a dictionary in the shortcut to store the color assigned to each app. You can annotate a screenshot and use the drawing tool’s color picker to obtain the RGBA values.
Expressions calculate the extent of each app’s colored region from its notification count.
Insert the resulting variables into an HTML template.
Convert the HTML into rich text, then turn the rich text into an image. Set the image dimensions to your device’s wallpaper size, which you can find in the details for a screenshot in Photos.
Opening an app clears that app’s message count.
It also removes the app name from the app list in Shortcuts Storage. The shortcut compares every item in the list and saves only those that do not match the selected app, thereby deleting that app’s entry.
This approach is no more precise than showing numbers. It is closer to ambient information: without actively checking your notifications, you can still perceive their overall state through changes in the wallpaper.
It suits people who use custom icons or find red notification badges stressful. You can turn off Badges in Settings and let the blended wallpaper colors represent your notifications instead.
Related shortcuts: App Notification Colors | Clear App Notification Records
04. Give different contacts different notification sounds
WeChat, a frequently used app, offers only a small selection of message sounds. In a crowded room, one notification can make several people reach for their phones at once. If an app’s notification sound is too generic and you want something more personal, Shortcuts can take over entirely: first turn off notification sounds for that app in Settings.
When the notification automation detects a message from a particular contact, it plays the corresponding audio file.
You can also group contacts into categories and assign a different audio file to each category.
Without even taking out your phone, the sound tells you who sent the message and whether it needs an immediate response.
You can download sound material online or make your own using Shortcuts.
First, make a screen recording. Then use the Convert Media action in Shortcuts to turn the video into audio and trim out the clip you want to assign to a contact.
Related shortcuts: Custom WeChat Notification Sounds | Convert Video to Audio
05. Automatically translate English notifications into Chinese
This is also useful for apps that send most of their notifications in English. It isn’t necessarily that you cannot understand the language; reading it may simply be slower than reading your native language. When you are glancing at a notification on the Lock Screen, an English message may take several extra seconds to process.
A notification automation can now take over those English notifications. When a selected app sends one:
Get notification content → Translate it into Chinese → Send a new notification in Chinese
This adds a layer of real-time translation to the original notification. You do not need to open the app or copy any text. You could even bring in AI to decide whether a notification is important and whether it should be translated or ignored.
Related shortcut: Translate English Notifications
Notifications are more than alerts
Beyond the message itself, every notification detail can be used as a condition for deciding whether a shortcut should continue. The app name, title, subtitle, and message, among other fields, can determine which action to perform. The content can also become shortcut input to be processed, categorized, recorded, or analyzed.
06. Build notification summaries before Apple Intelligence arrives in mainland China
Notification automation is particularly well suited to AI. Apple Intelligence includes notification summaries that automatically condense the important notifications you need to know about.
Until Apple Intelligence is available in mainland China, you can approximate the feature yourself with Shortcuts, combining notification automations and AI into a simple notification-summary system.
Save every notification to Shortcuts Storage, including details such as the app name, notification title and message, and the time it arrived.
By the end of the day, storage will contain a small “notification database.”
When you open an app, pass its previously saved notifications to an AI app that supports Shortcuts for summarization and analysis.
You might ask it to summarize today’s important notifications, collect today’s work-related WeChat messages, or summarize all shopping, payment, and delivery notices. You could count how many messages a particular contact sent each day and track the total for a month, then use changes in messaging frequency as a rough indicator of their mood. In this way, a mass of scattered notifications becomes a more readable information digest.
There is, however, one obvious drawback to notification automations.
They can retrieve only the content actually displayed in a notification, not the app’s complete notification content.
A notification sent by Shortcuts itself can display a long block of text, allowing the automation to capture fairly complete content. There is still an upper limit, but it is usually sufficient.
In apps such as WeChat, however, content beyond a certain display length is replaced with an ellipsis. Some notifications go further and merely say that a message was received without showing its contents at all.
In that situation, the notification automation can retrieve only the text up to the ellipsis. This is a real limitation for automations that need to process complete text. The design also raises accessibility questions, and I hope some apps will improve it.
Related shortcuts: Save Chat Records | Summarize Notifications
07. Remove a step from expense tracking
Notification automations can also streamline a common task: logging expenses. In the past, a typical Shortcuts workflow began with typed text or a screenshot. After making a purchase, for example, you might take a screenshot and have a shortcut extract the amount, merchant, and spending category.
At first, every transaction required you to enter the amount and choose a category. Later, system-level text recognition removed the need to type the amount. In the AI era, some expense-tracking apps began offering Shortcuts actions that could parse transaction details directly from a screenshot.
Notification automations eliminate one more step. Many payment apps already send a notification after a transaction is completed.
Shortcuts can read the transaction information directly from the payment notification, so there is no need to take a screenshot or enter the details manually. Spending categories and merchant information may be missing from some payment apps’ notifications, however, so this approach is best suited to people who record only income and expenses.
Related shortcut: Log an Expense
08. Schedule a WeChat message
Calendar alarms in Automator on the Mac never directly evolved into schedule-based automations in Shortcuts, but notifications from Calendar or Reminders can now reproduce something similar indirectly.
Create a reminder with a specific title and use that title as the automation trigger. Since reminders and calendar events can be assigned a time, they can run a shortcut on a schedule, for example, to send a WeChat message at a predetermined time.
Other reminder fields can hold the content you plan to send, including subtasks and notes. The title triggers the automation, while the notes store the actual message.
When a reminder notification titled “Send WeChat Message” arrives, the shortcut begins:
Receive notification → Find matching reminder → Get note text → Send the note to a specified contact → Mark the reminder as completed
The reminder notification also disappears after the automation finishes, so you do not need to clear it manually and will not end up with a screen full of reminder notifications.
If you like, a daily recurring reminder can even serve as a Cradle system, the dead man’s switch from Liu Cixin’s The Dark Forest. 🙂
If you do not manually complete the reminder, the preset message will automatically be broadcast to all your friends at the scheduled time.
If you create the reminder directly in the Reminders app, its time picker is limited to five-minute intervals.
Creating it with Siri removes that restriction.
Enable Type to Siri so you can use it conveniently in different situations and create reminders in natural language. Alternatively, you can create the reminder entirely through Shortcuts.
This lets you choose any reminder time while storing the message to send in the reminder’s notes.
Related shortcuts: Schedule a WeChat Message | Create Reminder
09. Bridge smart-home devices from different brands
Notifications can also act as a relay between smart-home products from different brands. Suppose your motion sensor and light bulb are made by different companies and cannot communicate directly.
When the Home app sends a notification that the motion sensor has detected movement, Shortcuts recognizes it and turns on the bulb automatically.
Notifications can therefore connect smart-home products across brand boundaries. They may even let devices whose original manufacturer has ceased operations continue working with products from a newer ecosystem.
10. Put reminders directly on your Home Screen
Shared reminders have one problem: when a family member assigns you several tasks, the system sends a separate notification for every one. If the list is long, the notifications become fragmented. You either have to deal with them one by one or open the Reminders app to see the complete list.
A notification automation can consolidate them.
When a “reminder assigned to you” notification arrives, for example, a shortcut can query the corresponding list, organize its reminders, and overlay them directly on the wallpaper.
The next time you pick up your phone, you can see your current tasks without opening Reminders.
You can take the idea further with WeChat notifications. Set up a WeChat notification automation that runs only when a collaborator sends a particular keyword. The shortcut can then query Reminders for the relevant details and proactively display them.
Photos can be attached to reminder details as well. A collaborator can therefore send you more than a written task: an image attached to the reminder can become a task-specific wallpaper.
Related shortcut: Put Reminders on the Home Screen
Conclusion
Notification automations in iOS 27 are more than one additional automation trigger. To some extent, they change how notifications can be handled. A notification stops being a simple alert and becomes an information source that Shortcuts can read, evaluate, and process.
Before: App → Notification → Person reads it → Person decides what to do next
Now: App → Notification → Shortcuts retrieves the content → Evaluates it → Performs an action → Notifies the person if necessary
The decisions and actions that once required human involvement can gradually be delegated to the system.
There is enormous room to imagine how far this mechanism might go. I hope these examples serve as a starting point for making shortcuts more useful and more fun.
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