App shortcut

An app shortcut is a menu the launcher draws for an app that is not running. Press and hold an icon on a home screen, or secondary-click one in the dock, and the shell asks the app for two to four things a person might want to start with: a new message, a new note, the last document, today’s list. Choosing one launches the app already inside that action. The menu is short by design, because it is read while a finger is still on the glass and because the launcher, not the app, decides how much room it gets.

The distinction from a context menu is what makes the term worth having. A context menu acts on an object you are already looking at: this file, this word, this row. An app shortcut acts on an application that is not open, so its items cannot refer to any selection or any state on screen. That constraint is the whole design problem. The items have to be the small set of entry points that make sense with no context at all, which is why “New note” is a good shortcut and “Delete” is not one. The trigger is also not the term: long press is the gesture that opens the menu on touch, the secondary click is its pointer equivalent, and neither is the thing that opens.

Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines treat this as one idea under two names, which is a useful signal that it is one component: Home Screen quick actions on iOS and iPadOS, Dock menus on macOS, the same short list of app-supplied actions in both places, with the platform adding a few of its own (Share, Remove App, Show in Finder). Android calls them app shortcuts and splits them by who defines them: static ones declared in the manifest, dynamic ones the app publishes at runtime, and pinned ones a person drags out to sit on the home screen as their own launcher. Be careful with the Apple name collision here: App Shortcuts in the App Intents sense are actions exposed to Siri and the Shortcuts app, a different feature entirely, and this entry is about the icon menu.

The craft is mostly restraint and ordering. Put the single most likely action first, since a finger sliding down from a held icon lands there. Keep labels to a couple of words, because the menu is sized by the launcher and long ones truncate. Never spend a slot on something the app opens on anyway. And treat the list as a promise about state: a dynamic shortcut naming a document that has since been deleted is worse than no shortcut, so publishing them means retiring them too.