Zapier makes its money on one basic idea: an event in one app sets off a response in another. The free tier stops you at 100 tasks a month, each limited to two steps, and stepping up costs $29.99 a month. Your phone pulls off the same trick at no cost, and nobody tallies how often it runs.
Apple tucks its version into the Shortcuts app as personal automations. Samsung calls its take Modes and Routines. When I rounded up things you can automate at home without buying any new gadgets, the phone’s own automation engine earned a spot on that list. This year, iOS 27 made Apple’s version approachable enough for anyone to set up in a few minutes. On both platforms, the real trick is letting an automation run without stopping to ask you first.
Zapier’s best idea already lives on your phone
Triggers and actions without a task meter
Zapier breaks every workflow into a trigger and an action. A new form submission might serve as the trigger; logging that entry in a spreadsheet could be the action. Each finished action burns one task from your allowance, so four daily workflows drain the free plan’s 100 before the month is out.
Phone automations follow the same structure but drop the meter. Your iPhone or Galaxy phone watches for a trigger (a time of day, a location, a charger connecting, an app opening) and runs the actions you’ve chained to it. Whether it fires twice a day or 200 times, nothing bills you.
Reach is the tradeoff. Zapier moves data between cloud apps even while your phone sits in a drawer, whereas phone automations act on the phone itself plus any apps and smart home devices that expose controls to it. For personal routines, that’s where most of the work happens anyway.
iPhone automations stopped asking for permission
One setting turns a reminder into a real automation
Shortcuts has offered personal automations for years, but the default behavior undercut them. A triggered automation sent a notification asking whether you wanted to run it, which took more effort than doing the task by hand.
You fix that with a single choice. Building an automation means choosing Run Immediately over the confirmation prompt. Flip off Notify When Run, too, unless you like seeing a banner each time it goes off. From then on, your iPhone simply does the job.
iOS 27 also moved automations around. Gone is the separate Automation tab. Triggers now mingle with every other action in the shortcut editor, and your automations can follow you across devices rather than staying stuck on a single phone.
Three triggers are brand new: a notification from an app you pick (which can filter by the text inside it), a screenshot getting saved, and a keyboard connecting. The notification trigger feels the most like Zapier, since a delivery alert from a shopping app can switch on your porch light.
If you’d rather kick off a routine with a physical press, the same building blocks work with your iPhone’s Action Button.
A sticker on the nightstand beats digging through menus
Time and location triggers fire on their own schedule. An NFC tag waits for you. I keep a few of these stickers around my house, and I’ve written about the best use I’ve found for an NFC tag before. In an automation, each one acts like a button you can stick anywhere.
The tags don’t have batteries. Your iPhone powers the chip for the instant it reads it, so a sticker cheap enough to buy by the dozen keeps working for years. Setup happens in the same editor as every other automation: add the NFC trigger, tap Scan, and hold the top edge of your iPhone against the tag so Shortcuts can register it and give it a name.
NFC is among the triggers Apple allows to skip confirmation, so pick Run Immediately here as well. A tag on your nightstand can then switch on a Sleep focus, set tomorrow’s alarm, and dim the bedroom lights with a single tap. Stick one on your car’s dashboard and it can pull up your commute in Maps. The scan registers most reliably with your phone awake and unlocked.
Samsung Modes and Routines does it with less setup
If-then rules that clean up after themselves
I’m on an iPhone, though Samsung shipped its own take years ago. Head to Settings > Modes and Routines and tap the Routines tab. Each rule pairs an If condition with a Then action. Conditions can be a time, place, Wi-Fi network, battery percentage, Bluetooth device, or app opening. Actions range from adjusting screen brightness to switching on Do Not Disturb.
There’s no confirmation toggle to dig for, either, because routines fire on their own from the start. They also undo their own changes. Once the condition ends, the phone restores the settings the routine altered, which means a bedtime routine that dims your screen puts brightness back in the morning without a second rule. It’s one of several Android features Apple should borrow.
Samsung keeps growing the action list, too. One UI 7 tacked on 32 new actions. One UI 8 followed with hooks into Calendar, Clock, and Samsung Notes, while One UI 8.5 brought Keep routine until, a setting that shuts a routine down after a chosen date or after it runs once. For even more conditions, the free Routines+ module in Good Lock layers on advanced options like touch macros.
- OS
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iOS
- Supported Content
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Shortcuts, Automations, etc.
Build one automation this week and let it prove itself
Zapier is still worth paying for when two web apps have to trade data with your phone switched off. For anything happening on or near your phone, the free option came preinstalled. Choose one thing you do every day, such as muting notifications at bedtime or queuing a playlist when CarPlay connects, and automate only that.
Give it a week of running in the background. Then add another. Smart plugs and bulbs widen the possibilities, and these automations that make a smart home feel actually smart work well with whatever your phone kicks off.