I Love Bear Notes, but it Doesn’t Have Shortcuts Support on Apple Watch (or Does it?)

Something I’ve been toying around with a lot more since the iPhone 15 Pro came out is the Action Button.

Right now on my phone, it simply adds a new task to Things 3 via Shortcut.

But on my Apple Watch Ultra, I always felt the perfect use case was to dictate a note?—?also via Shortcut, where I explicitly have the Dictate Text action. Otherwise, the watch inexplicably defaults to the swipe keyboard.

Press a button, say some stuff, and know it will be safely stored in my favorite notes app, Bear.

This shortcut has great utility in the car as well. I can just shout, “New Note” into the void and capture an idea.

But there’s one problem: Bear Notes doesn’t support Shortcuts on Apple Watch.

It feels pretty wild to me, because their Apple Watch app is well-thought out, if not good.

But alas, when I try to use the new note Shortcut, I get an error message because Bear Notes presumably doesn’t support Shortcuts on Apple Watch.

However, while writing this article, I made a discovery. Bear has 2 ways to create notes: “Create Note,” and “Create Bear Note.”

The Create Bear Note Shortcut action works on the Apple Watch.

That’s a huge relief, as my workaround was:

1. Make the note using Apple Notes
2. Create a Shortcut that imports all Apple Notes to Bear, then delete the Apple Notes
3. Create an Automation to run that Shortcut every time I open Bear.

Less than ideal.

But the plot thickens. On Bear’s own Shortcuts support page, they have this message:

Apple sometimes automatically creates “legacy actions” for apps that are not under our control. We recommend avoiding these actions: Create Bear Note, Create Bear Note from URL, open Bear Note, and Search in Bear.

SO they want us to use the “Create Note” action?—?even though it doesn’t work on Apple Watch.

I’m not sure what the moral of the story is. Use Create Bear Note at your own peril?

I’ve reached out to Bear support and will update this if I find out anything new!

I Love Bear Notes, but it Doesn’t Have Shortcuts Support on Apple Watch (or Does it?) was originally published in The Automated Solopreneur on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.