Creating Direct Links To Your iPhone Settings

If you know some hidden codes, you can set up Home Screen icons to take you right to screens in the Settings app on your iPhone or iPad. Learn how to use the Shortcuts app to set this up.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to create buttons on your iPhone Home Screen to go directly to specific settings. 
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So on your iPhone sometimes the settings that you often want to get to are very deep down and you have to remember where they are and then take several steps to get there. For instance say you want to switch On and Off to silence unknown callers. You could go into Settings, then you have to scroll all the way down and find Phone and then you have to go to Silence Unknown Callers, go inside there and there's the switch to turn it On or Off. It would be great if there was a way to just tap a button here and go directly to that setting. Well, you can do that using the Shortcuts App. But you need to know some hidden codes in order to do so. 
Let's go into Shortcuts and then I'm going to create a new shortcut, like that, and I'm going to add an Action. The action I'm going to add is kind of counterintuitive. I'm going to go to Apps and then I'm going to go down to Safari and then in Safari I'm going to open URL. So what does opening an URL in Safari have to do with getting to a specific screen in the Settings app. Well, it turns out that if you put just the right URL in there it will actually do exactly that. So you have to start these special URL's with Prefs. Then you  need to use a colon and then root and then=. Now here you will put the name of the preferences section. But it's not the name that appears in the Settings app. It's a specific name inside the code. So you have to know what the actual code name is for that. So you can either guess or you can look it up in a list and I'll show you a list later. For instance to get to the Bluetooth settings it's simply just Bluetooth. So capital B just like that. So prefs colon root = bluetooth. Done. Now let's assign this shortcut a name. So in here I'll just call it Settings Direct as an example. You might want to call it Bluetooth Settings. You could set the icon and color here as well. You could see here you could even use Hey Siri to activate this. 
I'm going to click here to attach the Home Screen. So I'm going to click Add to Home Screen and you could see it's called Settings Direct and it has that icon. We will add it. Now you can see I've added it to my Home Screen. Now if I just tap this it goes directly to Bluetooth Settings. Now what about digging deeper into Settings. Let's go in here and Edit this. Instead of going to Bluetooth let's go to General and that's just General as you would expect. Then you need to use the ampersand and then the word path to dig deeper into General Settings. Put equals and then we need to know the actual code name for this subsection. So as an example let's go to the Software Update Screen. So you have a quick way to check for software updates. The code name for that is in all caps SOFTWARE underscore UPDATE underscore LINK. Just like that. We'll click Done and we'll return to the Home Screen. Now when we use that shortcut it goes directly to Software Update. 
Sometimes you need to go down even more levels than this. So one path is is Keyboard with a capital K. Then slash and then down a level even deeper than that. So this will take us into General, into Keyboard, and into the User Dictionary Subsection, which is also known as Text Replacement. So if you often go here to edit your text replacements and add new ones now you have a shortcut to do it right there on the Home Screen. 
How about the Battery Health Screen. That's a sunscreen of the regular battery screen in Settings. So this is the path to get there. So now we can go directly there. Now remember the Silence Call screen I talked about earlier. Here's the path to get ther.  It's in the phone settings in the Path SILENCE underscore CALLS. So now we can get there with just one tap, turn On or Off. 
In the Settings App there are a lot of settings for specific apps. All the different apps you may have installed. It would be great to be able to go directly to one of those and you can. But, it's a little tricky. Because the actual path to these uses the Identifier for the App which is hidden from us. So it's not just the name of the app. It's the actual, what's called, Bundle ID for that app. So let me show you how to find that. It's a little tricky. It takes a bunch of steps but you can get it once you have that Bundle ID. Setting up the shortcut is the same.
So go in your browser, I'm going to do it on the Mac here, and search for the name of the app and maybe put App Store and Apple after it. Then do a search. You should come up with a link for apps.apple.com. Go to that and then look for the number after the letters I V. So in this case this is the app's number in The App Store. We're going to Copy that. Then we're going to go to the URL, iTunes at Apple.com/lookup? iV= and that number. So go there. It's going to want to download the file. So we'll Allow Downloads. Then we're going to go to the Downloads folder and you'll find it there. It's just a little text file. In this case 1.txt. We going to open that up in TextEdit. Then we're going to do Command F to find and search for Bundle ID and Return. We'll see here bundleid and then after that is the actual bundle ID. So it's usually com. and the company name, dot the app name. But in this case the company name is abbreviated  and you could see the app name has a capital T and then the number 2 after it. So it's not easy to just guess it. You have to go through these steps. This is what we want to use in the Shortcuts App. 
Just put it after prefs:root= and paste exactly that bundleid. It should look like that. So now when we go to Home Screen and use the shortcut it goes directly to the settings just for that app.
What if we wanted to go to the Notifications settings for that app. That's similar. We still need that bundle id. But instead we're going to use root=notifications underscore id. Then the path to be that bundle id for the app. So now we have a quick way to get to the Notifications setting for that app. 
So where to find all of the hidden codes so you can create these shortcuts. Well, there are lots of places online. One is this github repository here. Just go to this URL. Then look down further for the full list. Then go there. Then you'll find a huge list of them. They change all the time though with all the new updates, especially the major updates. So not all these are guaranteed to work right away. But if you do more searches you may be able to come up with the updated value for each one. Because you can see just about every setting section and subsection is accounted for here. Just know when you enter these if you mistype something or something has changed then it's not going to go anywhere. It'll just open the Settings App and it won't go to that specific section. You're not going to get an error message or anything.
So make sure you type everything exactly. When in doubt make sure that the case is the same. Uppercase or capital and everything is spelled exactly as it should be. So I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Here is the link in the video: https://github.com/FifiTheBulldog/ios-settings-urls.

Comments: 10 Responses to “Creating Direct Links To Your iPhone Settings”

Harold Appel

3 years ago

Thanks for this. I made a shortcut to the audio routing for my hearing aids that I'm always changing and was really annoying to get to without this little trick Thanks!

Rocky

Wow! Another great video! I use an app that shows a nightlight clock whenever I plug into my charger. The problem is it turns off the automatic Backup feature. So I set an automation to go to the Backup page when the phone is disconnected from the charger. Is there a way to drill down to the "Back Up Now" function?

Gary Rosenzweig

Rocky: Check that Github page to see if there is one. If not, I don't know what it would be.

Larry Garrard

Could you post the URL for the GitHub list of hidden codes, I could not get the URL to work you listed in the video. Thanks and I really like all your efforts to help us Mac and iPhone users out!

Larry: I posted it above.

Colin Hughes

2 years ago

Hi Gary

I am disabled and been looking for a way to turn on and off the auto answer accessibility with Siri. Will this method work for this? Is there a code for turning on and off auto-answer?

Colin: Do you mean "Hey Siri?" I don't think there's a way to turn it on and off that will be any easier than going to Settings. Why turn it off though? Just leave it on.

Nadav

hello, thanks for the video.
it was super useful. I have created a shortcut to settings - privacy - location
now there are 3 options in the settings to choose from . I would like to make the shortcut choose one of them automatically so I do not even need to open the settings and see it and choose myself but the shortcut do it for me. is there such way to tell the shortcut to do so?
thanks

Nadav: Probably not. Look at the link above and see.

Chas

Fabulous content. I have been searching everywhere for how to create a shortcut to go to Notifications for a particular app. If Siri will turn this Notification on or off I will be in heaven. Background: Real pain to turn security notifications on when we leave then back on when we get back. Would have never figured this out. So glad I found Macmost and your valuable content!

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Creating Direct Links To Your iPhone Settings

Comments: 10 Responses to “Creating Direct Links To Your iPhone Settings”

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