Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to create
buttons on your iPhone Home Screen to go directly to specific settings.
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So on your iPhone sometimes the settings that you often want to get to are very deep down
and you have to remember where they are and then take several steps to get there. For instance
say you want to switch On and Off to silence unknown callers. You could go into Settings,
then you have to scroll all the way down and find Phone and then you have to go to Silence
Unknown Callers, go inside there and there's the switch to turn it On or Off. It would be
great if there was a way to just tap a button here and go directly to that setting. Well,
you can do that using the Shortcuts App. But you need to know some hidden codes in order to do so.
Let's go into Shortcuts and then I'm going to create a new shortcut,
like that, and I'm going to add an Action. The action I'm going to add
is kind of counterintuitive. I'm going to go to Apps and then I'm going to go down to Safari
and then in Safari I'm going to open URL. So what does opening an URL in Safari have to do
with getting to a specific screen in the Settings app. Well, it turns out that if you put just the
right URL in there it will actually do exactly that. So you have to start these special URL's
with Prefs. Then you need to use a colon and then root and then=. Now here you will put
the name of the preferences section. But it's not the name that appears in the Settings app.
It's a specific name inside the code. So you have to know what the actual code name is for that. So
you can either guess or you can look it up in a list and I'll show you a list later. For instance
to get to the Bluetooth settings it's simply just Bluetooth. So capital B just like that. So prefs
colon root = bluetooth. Done. Now let's assign this shortcut a name. So in here I'll just call it
Settings Direct as an example. You might want to call it Bluetooth Settings. You could set the
icon and color here as well. You could see here you could even use Hey Siri to activate this.
I'm going to click here to attach the Home Screen. So I'm going to click Add to Home Screen
and you could see it's called Settings Direct and it has that icon. We will add it. Now you can see
I've added it to my Home Screen. Now if I just tap this it goes directly to Bluetooth Settings.
Now what about digging deeper into Settings. Let's go in here and Edit this. Instead of
going to Bluetooth let's go to General and that's just General as you would expect.
Then you need to use the ampersand and then the word path to dig deeper into General Settings.
Put equals and then we need to know the actual code name for this subsection. So as an example
let's go to the Software Update Screen. So you have a quick way to check for software updates.
The code name for that is in all caps SOFTWARE underscore UPDATE underscore LINK. Just like that.
We'll click Done and we'll return to the Home Screen. Now when we use that shortcut
it goes directly to Software Update.
Sometimes you need to go down even more levels than this. So one path
is is Keyboard with a capital K. Then slash and then down a level even deeper than that.
So this will take us into General, into Keyboard, and into the User Dictionary Subsection,
which is also known as Text Replacement. So if you often go here to edit your text replacements
and add new ones now you have a shortcut to do it right there on the Home Screen.
How about the Battery Health Screen. That's a sunscreen of the regular battery screen in
Settings. So this is the path to get there. So now we can go directly there. Now remember the
Silence Call screen I talked about earlier. Here's the path to get ther. It's in the phone settings
in the Path SILENCE underscore CALLS. So now we can get there with just one tap, turn On or Off.
In the Settings App there are a lot of settings for specific apps. All the different apps you may
have installed. It would be great to be able to go directly to one of those and you can. But, it's
a little tricky. Because the actual path to these uses the Identifier for the App which is
hidden from us. So it's not just the name of the app. It's the actual, what's called,
Bundle ID for that app. So let me show you how to find that. It's a little tricky. It takes a bunch
of steps but you can get it once you have that Bundle ID. Setting up the shortcut is the same.
So go in your browser, I'm going to do it on the Mac here, and search for the name of the
app and maybe put App Store and Apple after it. Then do a search. You should come up with a link
for apps.apple.com. Go to that and then look for the number after the letters I V. So in this case
this is the app's number in The App Store. We're going to Copy that. Then we're going
to go to the URL, iTunes at Apple.com/lookup? iV= and that number. So go there. It's going to want
to download the file. So we'll Allow Downloads. Then we're going to go to the Downloads folder
and you'll find it there. It's just a little text file. In this case 1.txt. We going to
open that up in TextEdit. Then we're going to do Command F to find and search for Bundle ID
and Return. We'll see here bundleid and then after that is the actual bundle ID. So it's usually
com. and the company name, dot the app name. But in this case the company name is abbreviated and
you could see the app name has a capital T and then the number 2 after it. So it's not easy to
just guess it. You have to go through these steps. This is what we want to use in the Shortcuts App.
Just put it after prefs:root= and paste exactly that bundleid. It should look like that. So now
when we go to Home Screen and use the shortcut it goes directly to the settings just for that app.
What if we wanted to go to the Notifications settings for that app.
That's similar. We still need that bundle id. But instead
we're going to use root=notifications underscore id. Then the path to be that bundle id for the
app. So now we have a quick way to get to the Notifications setting for that app.
So where to find all of the hidden codes so you can create these shortcuts. Well,
there are lots of places online. One is this github repository here. Just go to this URL.
Then look down further for the full list. Then go there. Then you'll find a huge list of them.
They change all the time though with all the new updates, especially the major updates.
So not all these are guaranteed to work right away. But if you do more searches you may be
able to come up with the updated value for each one. Because you can see just about every setting
section and subsection is accounted for here. Just know when you enter these if you mistype something
or something has changed then it's not going to go anywhere. It'll just open the Settings App
and it won't go to that specific section. You're not going to get an error message or anything.
So make sure you type everything exactly. When in doubt make sure that the case
is the same. Uppercase or capital and everything is spelled
exactly as it should be. So I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.