I’m enamored with the new action button on my iPhone 15 Pro Max. It’s one thing to hear rumors about it or read about the possible use cases on Apple’s website; it’s another thing entirely to have it in hand. We’re still in the early days of finding out what the action button can do in the real world, but I’m going to go ahead and call it a game-changer for me.

Aside from being an awesome fidget toy, it opens up a world of possibilities for customizing my iPhone. Apple did a great job of offering a wide array of built-in options like keeping the long-standing ring switch in place, using it to activate the phone’s flashlight, or tying it to an accessibility feature. The action button settings page (which has a very “they didn’t have to go this hard but I’m glad they did” vibe) offers something useful for every iPhone user.

But the most exciting option for me, of course, was Shortcuts. That one icon in the action button menu gives users a permanent hardware trigger for automating their iPhone in any way they like. Cue the Sickos meme because I know a lot of automation die-hards who have been waiting for something like this for years. And it’s finally here!

Shortcuts lovers have already come up with a variety of ways to use the action button to automate to their heart’s content, from opening a single favorite app to crafting massive shortcuts with branching menus to hacking the button into a multi-use trigger with the help of some JSON. If you think things have gotten weird already, believe me: We’re just getting started.

Personally, I’ve been drawn in by the option to show a folder of shortcuts whenever I press the action button. This brings up a never-before-seen UI for choosing shortcuts from a menu that I find both novel and satisfying. You can show up to seven shortcuts in this new circular format, and the menu even includes a quick way to open the Shortcuts app itself.

To take advantage of this Show Folder feature, I created a new shortcuts folder called Action Button and placed the seven shortcuts I’d like to run from the action button in it. I’m still tinkering with the setup a bit, but here’s what I’ve got in there for now:

Photo: Open the Camera app in photo mode.
Video: Open the Camera app in video mode.
Note: Create a new note by quickly entering text into a dialogue box.
Reminder: Create a new task in Reminders with a task name and assigned list.
Transaction: Log a new transaction in my budgeting app, OpenBudget, including its amount, category, and payee.
Habit: Chose a habit to mark as complete in Awesome Habits, my habit tracker.
Day Plan: Open my day plan in Structured.

I wish I had the option to add more shortcuts here, but the Show Folder menu will only show the first seven shortcuts in a folder. Anything past that is cut off. But if you have more than seven ideas and want to try them out, you can add as many shortcuts to the folder as you want and rearrange them over time to see which you’d like to keep.

This setup is working great for me so far. I find the menu to be easy to parse quickly so I can get to the shortcut that I need, and I’m already building muscle memory so I don’t have to look as closely when activating a shortcut. I imagine the action button is going to save me a lot of time when jotting down ideas and might even keep me from missing a Kodak moment in the future with near-instant access to the camera.

After thinking this all through and trying it out for a while, I started to wish that I could have the action button on all of my devices. Many of these tasks are things that I do on my iPad, Mac, and even Apple Watch, so it would be great to have quick access to them there as well. I decided that I want an action button everywhere.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the ability to add physical buttons to my devices. (I’d probably destroy them if I tried.) But I have come up with the next best thing: a set of ways to add the action button menu to my other devices via software.

It started with—you guessed it—another shortcut. I call this one Action Button as well. (If Apple can have three different products called Apple TV, I can have both a shortcut and a folder called Action Button.) It only has three actions:

Get My Shortcuts with the Action Button folder chosen as the parameter
Choose from Menu with the result of the previous action as the parameter
Run Shortcut with the result of the previous action as the parameter

When I run this shortcut on any of my devices, I’m presented with a list of my action button shortcuts, and I can choose whichever one I want to run. The menu isn’t as pretty as the custom Choose Folder menu on my iPhone, but other than that, this allows me to replicate the action button experience on all of my devices. And if I ever make a change to any of the shortcuts in the Action Button folder on my phone, those changes will automatically be reflected on my other devices, too.

With that sorted, I needed to find the quickest way to run my Action Button shortcut on each of my devices. It was time to get creative.

If I had an Apple Watch Ultra, that one would be easy: I could just run the shortcut from the action button. But since I wear a Series 7, I’ll have to settle for a Shortcuts widget in my smart stack for now. If you’re wondering what happens when you try to run an unsupported action on the Apple Watch like opening the camera, don’t fret. The watch will simply show you a message that says you can’t do that.

On the iPad, there are a couple of different ways I could go about this. The fastest way would be to add a Shortcuts widget to my lock screen and set it to the Action Button shortcut. This gets as close to the action button on the iPhone as possible, but it does come with the potential downfall of the shortcut timing out. (That lock screen time limit needs to be longer.)

Another option for my iPad would be to add a small Shortcuts widget to the home screen or Today view and run the shortcut from there. I’m giving the Today view approach a try for now.

And on the Mac, I’ve tied the keyboard shortcut Option-Command-Shift-A (A for action!) to the Action Button shortcut so I can active it from anywhere. It’s quite cool pressing just a few keys and having instant access to the tasks I perform most often.

That’s how I’ve implemented my action button setup across all of my devices. Of course, I’d much rather have a physical action button to press. (Can you imagine how cool an action button would look on the side of an iPad Pro?) But for now, at least, this technique is working out for me.

Automation is one of the most powerful workflows that our devices enable for us, and having consistent automation tools across devices basically gives us superpowers. Now that I’ve gotten a taste of the action button life, I’m never going back. I want to have it everywhere, so I’ve put it everywhere. And I only hope to see the action button become a more foundational part of my workflow as time goes on.