I do love a good time-saver, and sometimes the best time-savers of all are the ones that are right under the surface of our favourite apps and services, just waiting to be seen. I’ll admit it. Even as someone who uses and thinks about Android almost constantly, as part of both my life and my job, I frequently find myself surprised by how often I stumble onto something that I knew about at some point but long ago forgot to keep using. It happened to me with some of the Android Assistant tricks we talked about a couple months ago, and it’s happened to me yet again now with a powerful shortcut system built right into Android and supported by oodles of different apps.
The system is called, rather fittingly, App Shortcuts. It’s been around since 2016’s Android 7.1 Nougat release, and it was originally framed as a response to Apple’s once-buzzworthy 3D Touch feature on the iPhone.
And that, as I wrote at the time, is the true Achilles heel of Android’s App Shortcuts: the system tries too hard to emulate
