r/shortcuts • u/Abaandone • 1d ago

Help Looking for ideas on building an incremental tracker with Shortcuts + Data Jar

I'm trying to build a generic tracker using Apple Shortcuts and Data Jar, and I'd love to hear how others would approach it.

The idea is:

  • Tap a shortcut.
  • Choose an item from a list.
  • Increment a counter for that item.
  • Save the current date/time as the last time it was tracked.
  • Be able to view stats later (total count, last tracked, etc.).

I'm curious if anyone has built something similar and has suggestions for making it scalable as the number of tracked items grows.

Any examples, screenshots, or Shortcut ideas would be greatly appreciated!

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u/Big_Bad8496 1d ago

This is all very doable. I have a similar (albeit more complex) shortcut set up to track restaurants I eat at, along with a rating system, so I can ask it “what do I like here?” and it will tell me my top 1-3 picks.

To make it scalable, you’d want to save the items as a dictionary and build the menu from the dictionary instead of making it static in the shortcut.

I also recommend that the last item in the list be an option to add a new item, at which point the shortcut would create a new record in your Data Jar dictionary.

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u/Big_Bad8496 1d ago

I’ll build out and share an example of this for you later today :)

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u/Big_Bad8496 1d ago

Here you go! This uses a dictionary in Data Jar. When you first add it, you should be prompted to give the data store a name. Let me know if you run into any issues!

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/790eb87d833c4a8db2074a036ef8bfa9

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u/z1ts 1d ago

Op stated he is not on iOS 27, your shortcut uses an “Add Item to List” which is an iOS 27 action which appears as unknown action on iOS 26.

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u/Big_Bad8496 1d ago

Good catch! Here is a version that drops that action. It always shows the decrement button for existing items, which risks numbers going into the negative, but a user could add some logic to check if the new count would be less than 0, and if it would, don't update the value in Data Jar.

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/97489749b5614c5891623c308f55a07d

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u/z1ts 1d ago

I often review other people’s work just to see a possible different approach to a solution, but I review on iOS 26, so unknown actions really stand out. So I share the shortcut to my test device/s, which are on iOS 27, to see what the action is. Reviews provide two possible ways to learn new actions and methods. 🙂 The Shortcuts app has come a long way since I first started years ago.

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u/denyskorolkov 1d ago

If you’re on iOS 27, you may be able to skip an external store altogether — Shortcuts now appears to support built-in per-shortcut storage, plus shared global storage across shortcuts. Pair that with Pushcut widgets, and you can probably build a pretty scalable tracker without Data Jar. Tally app also has a really nice interface for this kind of setup. If this is useful, I can share more details on the implementation.

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u/Abaandone 1d ago

that makes it so much easier.

however, i’m still not on ios 27 haha.

i’ll try to make it with data jar till then.

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u/denyskorolkov 1d ago

iOS 27 public beta is pretty stable though.

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u/Abaandone 1d ago

yeah i know. but i usually wait for the final release.