How I setup my iPhone’s Action Button

The Action But­ton on the iPhone 15 Pro is a small fea­ture I eager­ly antic­i­pat­ed.

Apple offers nine options from which I specif­i­cal­ly want­ed to access both the silent mode and the cam­era. I also want­ed the actions to acti­vate right away upon press­ing the Action but­ton, with­out need­ing to select any­thing from the on-screen menu after the but­ton press.

Giv­en my pref­er­ences, I knew it has to be through an iOS short­cut but lack­ing the tech­ni­cal knowl­edge to set it up myself, I turned to the inter­net for help. My search lead me to this Thread by John Gru­ber from Dar­ing Fire­ball. I instant­ly liked it as it felt like a good bal­ance between the sin­gu­lar options Apple pro­vides and some extreme setups I have seen.

Click on this Thread to learn more.

To set this up, you will need to install the Actions app, and down­load the two short­cuts from the fol­low­ing iCloud links:

• Action But­ton: Cam­era / Mute Face-Down. Here is the screen­shot of this short­cut:

• Tog­gle Silent Mode. Here is how this short­cut looks:

When I tried to set­up these short­cuts, I faced the fol­low­ing prob­lems:

• The actions did­n’t show up in the Short­cuts app.
  • There is an exact FAQ for this prob­lem here, and the solu­tion is to restart the phone and it worked.
• You may notice that iPhone won’t vibrate on switch­ing to the silent mode.
  • This can be fixed by select­ing the “Play in Silent Mode” option from Set­tings → Sounds & Hap­tics → Hap­tics.