Make Settings Obey, Not The Other Way Around

I opened Settings to kill one notification and came back with three VPN profiles, a podcast sulking in a corner, and a reminder that Apple’s housekeeping is my junk drawer, looks tidy until you need batteries. You know the dance. New iOS, new Settings shuffle, same treasure hunt. It is organized in the way a sock pile is organized, technically true, practically useless. I do not need a pilgrimage to toggle a mic, I need a light switch, preferably one that does not lead to a hallway labeled Profiles while my music app pretends it has never met me. Bonus points if the mic drop, you know, stays a dropdown. This is not about taste, it is about control. When the route to a permission gets longer, fewer people walk it, and that is the point. Platforms benefit because fewer settings get changed, ad hungry apps benefit because mic, location, and notifications stay on by inertia, you pay in battery, privacy, and minutes you will not get back. Friction is a policy choice, dressed up as design, a speed bump welded to a staircase, the wrong thing gets slowed, the right thing gets punished. Make it hard to say no, more people say yes without thinking, and that quiet tax smells like a gym bag someone forgot in July, faint across the room, awful once you lift the lid. We can do better without waiting for a software update and a promise shaped like a keynote. We do not need another guided tour of the menu, we need a trapdoor we control, one step down, toggles right there, back up, done. So, tiny hack time. Not jailbreaks, not spells, just Shortcuts, the one Apple app that accidentally hands power back to you. Your phone already knows the app you are using, it already knows that app’s bundle identifier, the com.whatever.AppName line every developer whispers to provisioning demons, a bundle of joy only a build server could love. Settings already opens app pages from a URL that starts with App-prefs:, ends with that identifier, and minds its business. Put those pieces together, voilà, you get a one tap hop straight into the exact panel for the app in front of you. No scrolls, no Spotlight detours, no guessing which submenu hides the thing you need, it feels like finding the spare key you taped under the planter, future you did past you a solid for once. Build it in three moves, all thumbs, no drama. First, open Shortcuts, make a new one called Quick App Settings, add Get Details of App, set it to Current App, choose Bundle Identifier as the detail. Second, add a Text action that says App-prefs: then drop in the identifier you just grabbed, variables are fine if you like them, plain text plus variable works just as well. Third, add Open URLs, feed it that App-prefs: text, save. If it balks, you probably fat fingered the colon or glued a space on the front, do not ask me how I know. Run it once from Shortcuts to prove it, enjoy watching Settings open directly to the page that actually matters. Now park it where your thumb lives. Open Settings, open Control Center, add the Shortcuts control, pick your new shortcut, then drag it near the bottom right quadrant if you are right handed, near the left if you are a contrarian. Give it a gear icon so your brain has a picture to grab. From there it is one swipe, one tap, land on the exact switch you wanted. Tap, land, change the thing, return to your life, no victory music, just results. Caveat for the faithful, the Camera app is the diva here and will not jump on cue. Fine. Its settings sit near the top anyway, scroll a little and move on. Everything else behaves, from Music’s audio quality to Slack’s cache purge, instant open, instant fix. The first time you try it you will toggle a few extras just because you can, like cleaning the fridge door and suddenly committing to the whole shelf, then you keep doing it because the path stays short, which is the entire point. Zoom out. This is about making scrutiny cheap. Companies normalize the grind, ship a reorganized menu, and call it a present, meanwhile you bleed seconds, your consent gets lazy, and the defaults win. Lower the cost of action and you will take action, more often, with less drama. Turn off background refresh for the game that should not talk to anything, pull mic access from the chatty social app, cut cellular data for that streaming app when you are not on Wi Fi, ordinary self defense, applied consistently, no cape required. Time for real talk versus performance art, actual fixes feel like shorter routes you can repeat, not renamed tabs with more taps. Permissions are casino fire exits, technically available, carefully inconvenient. Now you own a shortcut to the door. We are done here. Three moves, one tile, and Settings turns from a labyrinth into a hallway you paved yourself. Which brings us to the fun part, the part where the phone starts working for you again, not the other way around. Make refusal easy, and you will refuse more often. Make inspection easy, and you will inspect more often. The battery lasts longer, the noise dies down, and the small choice to put a gear in Control Center pays you back every day you do not waste hunting for a toggle someone buried on purpose. That is not clever, that is maintenance of your own attention, and it is worth protecting. --Doc (yeah I said it!) find me anywhere under @DocAtCDI