Scripting is not for everyone, we know. It’s even more complicated to build a script on iOS: the very nature of this mobile operating system prevents us to tinker as we can do on a computer. The reason is, according to Apple, to ensure maximum reliability and security of their mobile devices. For those of us who want to hand the complete and extreme customization of any device they hold and have always looked to iOS with frustration, for the last few years there’s Workflow.
Workflow is an app that you find on Apple’s App Store. It allows you to build workflows (hence the name) that are as close to a real scripting system for iOS as they can be. In the simplest version, it allows with a single touch to perform operations that would require more than three or four interactions with the system or with various apps. Open Safari, retrieves the link, shorten it, send it by email to someone. Four touches: Workflow can do it in just a touch. Now take this concept and apply it to almost any aspect of your iPhone or iPad.
Workflow won the 2015 Apple Design Award, which is given to the best app, and now comes the news that Apple has acquired Workflow: they bought the app and the team that developed. First, the app has been made free from the App Store. The team will join the Cupertino engineers to, presumably, integrate advanced functionality into iOS. It’s probably a bit too late to see these features on stage at the annual developer conference (held in San Jose in early June), but who knows, perhaps when iOS 11 will be ready in autumn something will come out.
For now, you can try Workflow for free. For the future, we have to wait.