NFC Shortcuts in HomeKit

Some of you have asked me about the new iOS 13 automations, since they’re not as flexible as we’d like. They’ve come a long way, enough to let you set up simple conditions like we talked about in the post on what’s new in HomeKit with iOS13, but they still fall a bit short for advanced users. Even so, and although I’m planning a more general post about the Shortcuts app with examples and possibilities, this time I wanted to tell you how NFC Shortcuts work in Homekit, since you can do a lot more with them than I had imagined actually need. HEADS UP: NFC automations are only available on iPhone XS or newer, if you have an X, an 8 or older it’s not possible to read the stickers 🙁

NFC Automations

Automations through NFC aren’t only available for the ‘Home’ side of things, you can also automate other kinds of actions not necessarily related to Home. As you may have seen in the new Shortcuts app, automations are centered there and split into two groups, but this time we’re going to focus only on the Home ones.

There are mini NFC stickers about the size of a euro coin. This sticker is basically a unique serial number, so when you place an NFC reader over it, it’s able to read that serial number and associate it with a specific action. That’s it, this type of sticker is very, very simple and doesn’t need power or anything like that, the reader itself (our phone) provides enough energy to activate the sticker and read the number. I bought these, which are available on Amazon:

As you can see, the size is really small. The basic idea is to place some of these stickers in strategic spots so certain actions get triggered. Let me give you an example: every time I go to sleep I put my iPhone on a wireless charging pad. On this pad I have an NFC sticker, so that when I place the phone on the pad to charge and it’s nighttime (it could be daytime, in which case the action doesn’t run), it turns off any lights left on around the house, switches the boiler to night mode (which is simply a change in the activation temperature range) and arms the alarm. Without doing anything, without confirming anything, without asking Siri for anything, just by placing the phone on its pad on top of the sticker, pretty cool, right? Well, let’s see how you can do this 🙂

Setup and Configuration

There’s nothing you need to do to the sticker itself as we mentioned before, no need to activate it or change its battery since it doesn’t have any kind of power supply. What we do need to do is identify each of the stickers on the phone, and to do that you need to do the following. Open the Shortcuts app, go to the Automation section found in the bottom bar and Create a New Automation:

As we mentioned earlier, we can create either a personal automation or a Home automation. In this case we need to create a personal automation, since in the Home automation options we can’t add NFC stickers as triggers, but you’ll see how it’s actually possible to interact with Home elements from the personal ones.

Once you’re in this section, you need to scroll down to the group called Settings and select the NFC option to scan the corresponding sticker. Remember that each sticker has a unique number, so it’s best to do this one at a time so you don’t mix them up:

And then, we simply need to tell it from the App list that we want to use the Music app, to Play a specific playlist (though it could also be your whole Library) in Shuffle mode.

Heads up, it’s important to turn off confirmation, otherwise it’ll ask you every time and you’ll have to tap Accept, so it won’t be fully automatic. Once you confirm, the automation will show up already created and there’s nothing else to do:

Some examples

As you can see, a whole new world of possibilities opens up for automating random little things!! Don’t go filling your house with stickers though, because it’ll be hard to remember what each one is for, I can see you getting carried away. Let me tell you about some things I’ve done:

NEED: Arm the alarm and turn off all the lights when leaving the house. But I can’t automate this to trigger every time my phone leaves, because sometimes someone stays home.

SOLUTION: A sticker next to the front door so it triggers those actions when I place my phone on it. I even recorded a little video for you.

NEED: Play Podcasts when I’m at the office. Every morning, when I get to the office, I catch up on the day’s tech news by listening to some podcasts.

SOLUTION: A sticker where I set my phone down when I arrive at the office, with an action that plays the podcasts from the ‘Listen’ section.

NEED: Play Music in the car in a TRULY random way. I don’t know if it’s my car’s radio, but every time I get in and the music starts playing after connecting to Bluetooth, it ALWAYS starts with the same song. I want it to actually be random.

SOLUTION: A sticker where I place my phone when I get in the car, and if your car also has a wireless charging spot where you leave your phone, even better! Linked to this sticker, you create the action to play music on shuffle.

This last action can be polished a bit more with Shortcuts, since for example it could take into account whether you have your headphones on or not… but for now this works fine, we’ll talk more about that in the post I’m preparing about Shortcuts.

It’s a really simple automation to set up and it saves you a few steps, like asking Siri to run a certain action or looking it up in the Home app to do it manually. Obviously it’s not meant for automated tasks that will ALWAYS run at the same time, since that’s what basic schedules are for, but it’s great for those things we do regularly that can’t be tied to a specific time. I hope you liked it, and that together we can come up with new silly little things to automate! hahahaha.