Your IPhone Can Automatically Wish Friends a Happy Birthday
Who among us has never forgotten the birthday of a friend or family member? We all lead busy lifestyles and often all we can do is keep up with our own schedule of appointments, appointments and deadlines. And even if you briefly remember that it’s your father-in-law’s birthday while you’re doing something else, chances are you’ll forget it again before you have a chance to text or call him. However, your iPhone can help you with this – it can send messages to them, ensuring that you (seem to) never miss a birthday.
Apple doesn’t have a built-in feature to automatically send messages related to birthdays or otherwise. Instead, we’ll turn to the powerful but little-used “automations” of the Shortcuts app to make this work.
How to Automate Birthday Messages on Your iPhone
To get started, the automation relies on the data you provide in the Contacts app, so you’ll open that app and add birthdays to any contact you want to send an annual birthday message to. Then open “Shortcuts” then add ” Birthday Today ” shortcut to the app. You can run the shortcut manually every day (if you think you won’t forget it) and it will automatically send a happy birthday message to the right people. To customize your birthday message, tap the three dots in the top right corner of the label’s thumbnail. Find the “Submit” block, then edit the message inside. Click “Done” when you’re ready.
Automate birthday messages
If you don’t think you’ll be running it every day, you can also automate the process: open the Shortcuts app, tap on ” Automation ” at the bottom, tap on the ” + ” icon at the top right, and select ” Create Personal Automation “. .
Now select “Time of day” and set the time you want to send texts. If you want to be among the first to send a message to every person, you can set it to midnight. If you prefer a more casual setting, set the time for mid-morning or so. In the Repeat section, make sure you select Daily . This will force the automation to run once a day. Click Next .
On the next page, select the Applications tab and find Shortcuts , then click Open Shortcuts. Click the button next to ” Open ” and select ” Birthday Today ” from the list of shortcuts. Click ” Next ” again.
In the last step, disable the ” Ask before launch ” option and click ” Finish “. That’s all! Your iPhone will automatically send birthday greetings to people in your contacts.
Keep browsing your contacts
Of course, the problem with automation is that you can end up connecting with people you don’t want to talk to. Your automation can’t tell if a particular contact is your ex or someone you’ve stopped contacting. That’s why you should periodically review and delete unwanted contacts, or just delete the birthdays of those you don’t want to contact. And while you’ll mostly be adding birthday information for your contacts manually, keep in mind that if someone shared a contact with you, they may have added a birthday, and you could also inadvertently send that person a happy birthday greeting. birth.
You can also periodically change the birthday message you send. A little adjustment once a year will make it less obvious that you’re just copying the same text over and over again.