AutoPlay Music When Hopping in the Car
Apple’s Shortcuts app may be one of the best things to come to iOS in recent years. It hides a lot of power, opening up all sorts of new capabilities on your iPhone and iPad — and now with macOS 12 Monterey, it’s available on your Mac, too.
One great trick shared this past summer by our own Managing Editor, Elijah Fox, lets you automatically start up your favourite tunes whenever you hop in the car and connect to CarPlay.
The secret sauce here is that shortcuts in iOS 15 can be kicked off by a whole variety of different triggers, and some of them are actually quite powerful. The CarPlay trigger obviously kicks off a shortcut whenever you connect to your in-car system, but there are a whole bunch of others, letting you automate tasks to run when you connect to your home Wi-Fi network, when you connect to your charger, or even when you receive emails or messages from certain people, with specific keywords.
This music app trick works even better if your car has Wireless CarPlay, since you won’t even have to pull your iPhone out of your pocket. It also works over Bluetooth too — just use the Bluetooth trigger in your automation and choose your car as the Bluetooth device.
You can also use the same approach to autoplay music when you pop in your AirPods or other favourite Bluetooth headphones. You can even have different mixes for different headphones, such as a calling up a workout playlist for your AirPods Pro or a chill mix for your AirPods Max.