App Store Links Made Beautiful with Shortcuts

September 23, 2025

One of the small but constant frictions of running a blog about apps is dealing with App Store links. Grabbing the name, copying the link, fetching an icon, turning it all into a nicely formatted snippet—it’s not hard, but it’s repetitive. And if you do it often enough, it’s exactly the kind of thing that cries out for automation.

That’s where this Shortcut comes in. Built entirely with stock Shortcuts actions, it takes a single App Store link and spits out a polished Hugo shortcode ready to paste into a blog post, complete with app name, link, and icon. What used to be a multi-step process is now a single tap.

⸻

How It Works

Getting the App Store ID

The Shortcut starts by receiving an App Store URL, either from the Share Sheet or your clipboard. Using a quick regex ((?<=id)\d+), it extracts the numeric app ID buried in the link. That ID becomes the key for looking up everything else.

Pulling App Metadata

Next, Shortcuts’ built-in Find on the App Store action does the heavy lifting. It takes the app ID and returns structured data: the app’s name, its store page, and, crucially, the artwork URL for the icon.

At this point, the Shortcut already knows enough to generate a working app card, but it goes further.

Naming and File Prep

The app’s name is cleaned up and stored in a variable, then URL-encoded so it can be used safely as a filename. That ensures that even apps with spaces, dashes, or punctuation won’t break the upload process later.

Uploading the Icon

Here’s where things get clever. The Shortcut builds a GitHub API request to upload the app icon directly into the site’s repository. It grabs your personal API key, encodes the file, and sends it off with a PUT request. If the file already exists, the Shortcut skips the upload to avoid duplicates.

Behind the scenes, this means your blog’s /static/images/App Store App Icons/ folder is automatically updated with the latest app logos—no manual dragging or renaming required.

Assembling the Shortcode

Finally, everything comes together in a Hugo appcard snippet:

This block gets copied straight to your clipboard, ready to paste into any Markdown file. The icon path matches the uploaded file, the link points back to the store, and the name is exactly as it appears in Apple’s listing.

⸻

Why It Matters

This is a classic example of automation as time-saving infrastructure. Writing about apps often involves dozens of small formatting chores that add up. By moving them into a Shortcut, you don’t just save a few clicks—you make the whole workflow predictable, repeatable, and error-free.

Better still, it’s all built with the tools Apple ships on every device. No third-party apps, no scripting languages, no dependencies. Just Shortcuts, GitHub, and a bit of creativity.

⸻

The Result

Now, when inspiration strikes, I don’t have to think about sourcing icons or formatting snippets. I just share an App Store link, run the Shortcut, and paste the finished card into my blog post. It’s instant, it’s reliable, and it makes my site look great with zero extra effort.

For a blog that lives and breathes apps, this Shortcut has become one of those invisible automations that pays dividends every single day.