Quotes 🧡 Shortcuts

Build automation and workflow with Apple Shortcuts

Dear Quotes Lover,

Happy New Year!

As we step into a new year, I’ve been thinking about where Quotes should grow next.

While keeping it modern and simple in its UI and UX, we also want it to be flexible and powerful enough for power users to weave into their own workflows. To get there, programmability and automation are essential. That’s why, in the next chapter of development, we’re starting to steadily build out this area.

I originally planned to ship deep links in this release. But during the research phase, it became clear that, compared to deep links, Apple’s ecosystem now strongly favors Shortcuts for automation. There are two main reasons. First, Shortcuts uses GUI-based programming, which is far more approachable. Second, it offers stronger data-protection mechanisms. With deep-link approaches, users often need to generate and manage API keys to access app data. With Shortcuts, that step simply disappears—one less thing to worry about.

When we talk about programmability, we’re really talking about composability. A composable system uses a small set of building blocks to create a wide range of solutions. So in this update, we didn’t ship a single “complete” feature. Instead, we added a collection of building blocks. Think of them as vocabulary: you can combine them to form the sentences you need.

The List of Quotes Shortcut Actions

Two months ago, a user posted on our feedback forum asking for OCR support, so they could import text from quote images into Quotes. Before this release, you might have had to wait for the Quotes dev team to implement it. With this release, the tools are in your hands, shaped by your own ideas!

By connecting Quotes’ “Distraction-Free Capture” with Apple’s system-level OCR, like what I did in the above screenshot, you can create an image-to-text quote collector tailored exactly to your own workflow.

If you have a specific workflow in mind, give the Quotes shortcuts a try! I’ve prepared a document with a detailed “vocabulary list” of the available building blocks. If you run into any problem, please reach out using the in-app support button. Or, like many other users, feel free to leave a note in our feedback forum.

If you’re enjoying Quotes, a 5-star rating on the App Store is a small gesture that makes a real difference—for us, and for other quote lovers looking for a better tool.

Until next time, happy quoting!

Best,

Conan