New Apple security feature reboots iPhones after 3 days, researchers confirm

After reading your comment, I was interested in whether or not I could achieve this through the built-in Shortcuts app. Unfortunately, "Restart" is not an available action.

Edit: Actually, I was looking in the wrong place. It’s an option for the "Shut Down” action. Thanks, @jwond!

It’s so frustrating having a nice Shortcut idea just to hit a limitation right away.

There is a restart action. You need to first add the Shut Down action, then you can change it to Restart.

I'm so dumb. I didn't even click into the "Blank Actions" tile.

Nice! Just created an automation to restart daily at 4:00am. Hopefully it works without user input.

Thank you very much. I've wanted to have a weekly reboot of my phone for years now, and it drove me nuts that I couldn't create a shortcuts automation for it.

But can you have it run a fixed period of time after last using your phone?

Just tried it. Unfortunately, even when you choose "Run Immediately", it still asks for user input when the time comes ("Are you sure you want to restart this iPhone?")

Yeah shortcuts could be much more useful. I wanted to make a post request when I arrive at some place with some additional javascript logic to update an authentication token. It just doesn’t work when running in the background, I have to manually trigger it

Unfortunately not. Looks like you can set the time (or choose sunrise or sunset), and then you can set it to repeat daily, weekly, or monthly. No option based on inactivity.

However, you can set it to shutdown or reboot if it receives an email that contains a specific string in the subject line. So you could have a computer that sends it a shutdown email. You could base it off of inactivity of that computer, or you could have it listen for a cancel-shutdown email, which could be sent by the iPhone when it connects to WiFi (assuming you don't live someplace like a university campus where you're always connected to WiFi even when you leave home.) If the computer doesn't receive the cancel-shutdown email within the set period of time, the computer would send the shutdown/reboot email to the iPhone.

However, like another commenter pointed out [1], the action doesn't even seem to work currently as of iOS 18.0.1. If you set it to "Run Immediately" with "Notify When Run" to off, it just doesn't run. If you turn "Notify When Run" on, the action runs, but still requires you to confirm it manually with a tap, which defeats the purpose of the automation. Who knows, maybe a future update will fix it.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42144044

I created a shortcut to turn off my iPad every night. It’s useless

While we're on the topic of Shortcuts, does anyone know how to do decent data transfer? I've been wracking my head to figure out how to replace my termux script on Android that would sync photos to my home computer whenever I was on my local wifi (or wifi and tailscale).

I know shortcuts has an ssh action but it appears quite buggy and if I try to do any real bash scripting or wanting to not overwrite existing backups it hangs. It doesn't handle

  [[ ! -a "$FILE" ]] && cat /dev/stdin "$FILE"

Even with more formal if statement notation. Best I have come up with is a very painful shortcut that repeats this for each thing I want to sync

  if [[ ! -a "$FILE" ]];
  then
     cat /dev/stdin "$FILE"
  else
     cat /dev/stdin /dev/null
  fi

Seems to hate functions. iSH and others can't seem to access the photos library. There's got to be some way I can get those out of the sandbox. (God damn is the app buggy. This is worse than programming in brainfuck)

I am using an app for this. It's called WebDavNav+ and there is a free version WebDavNav for evaluation.

You can create sync configurations and switch on auto sync.

I have an Odroid HC4 with Open Media Vault and docker which is my personal NAS. It runs a WebDav container and so on a daily basis my iPhone is backing up photos to my NAS using WebDavNav+.

I have had my phone set to reboot every day at sunrise and have had no issues with it prompting for input in weeks.

Thanks! I mean I don't need anything fancy and honestly, I don't want to run a web server (I will if that's what's needed, it's better than this Shortcuts hell). I feel I shouldn't need fancy tools to do some pretty basic things, you know?

I'll be honest, I'm just a bit pissed Apple intentionally handicaps powerusers, and pushes people into their paid solutions. It's one thing to offer a paid solution, it's another thing to create a problem and then sell the solution. I mean just an iCloud backup isn't even good enough. Don't they know 3-2-1?

I see your point. I already had the NAS in place so it was a nobrainer for me, but if you just want to backup to computer you can still run a light webdav server on your computer. For example, I am using dufs [0], which is very easy to deploy and configure.

[0] https://github.com/sigoden/dufs