You can access App Shortcuts by pressing and holding your finger down on an app's icon - either on your home screen or in your app drawer - for about a second. The ins and outs of Android App Shortcutsįirst, let's back up for a quick primer on what exactly App Shortcuts are and how you can put 'em to use: App Shortcuts are basically just direct links to specific functions within apps on your phone - ways you can get to individual actions or areas within an app without having to go through the typical process of opening it up, plopping around through its menus, and tapping multiple commands to get where you want to go. So enough of my blathering: It's time to discover - or perhaps rediscover - the productivity-boosting potential of Android's App Shortcuts.
And with a teensy bit of tinkering, you can make some of 'em even more useful. When you do press the right icons, though, you're bound to be delighted by the buried treasures you unearth.
#WHERES MY SHORTCUT BAR FULL#
The especially tricky thing about Android's App Shortcuts is that even if you do remember that they exist in general, you never know which apps take full advantage of the system and which don't - or when any given app is updated with a richer set of shortcut options - unless you just haphazardly press icons every few weeks to see what, if anything, happens. Out of sight, out of mind - it's a very real phenomenon.Īnd here we are, all these years later, talking about how so many of us forget to take advantage of these time-saving possibilities. Users who know about the options are likely to forget they exist and underutilize them, too, as often happens with non-obvious commands in a user interface. Their presence is completely hidden, with no visual cues whatsoever you'd have to happen to long-press an icon to find them, and even then, you might not fully grasp what happened or why those items appeared. Heck, looking back at what I said about the shortcuts five-plus years ago seems almost eerily prophetic and like a too-perfect prologue to what we're talking about today:
#WHERES MY SHORTCUT BAR FOR ANDROID#
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 Apple instead of focusing on what makes sense for Android and would provide the best possible experience in our preferred environment.
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