How to reliably open YouTube links in the YouTube app using an iOS Shortcut

When you open a YouTube URL copied from Safari or other apps as-is, it may play in a browser or display in an unintended format. This shortcut parses the YouTube URL in your clipboard and converts it into a YouTube-app URL scheme (vnd.youtube://) before opening it.

It supports these three cases:

• youtube.com/shorts/... (Shorts)
• youtube.com/watch?v=... (Standard video)
• Anything else (fallback: replace only the scheme and try opening in the app)

Overall flow

1. Get the URL string from the clipboard
2. Use a regular expression to check if it’s a Shorts URL → extract the video ID
3. Use a regular expression to check if it’s a standard watch URL → extract the video ID
4. Build vnd.youtube://... based on which ID was obtained
5. Open the final URL

Steps (Action setup)

1) Get the clipboard content

• Action: Text
• Content: Clipboard
• In this guide, the resulting string is called inputUrl

From here on, the shortcut determines what kind of YouTube URL inputUrl is, then converts it into an appropriate “open in YouTube app” URL.

2) Detect whether it’s a Shorts URL and extract the video ID

• Action: Match Text (against inputUrl)
• Regular expression:

^https?://(?:www\.|m\.)?youtube\.com/shorts/([\w-]{11})(?:\?.*)?

• If it matches, retrieve the capture group (video ID):

  • Action: Get Group from Matched Text
  • Group index: 1
  • Call the extracted 11-character ID shortsId

If shortsId is obtained, it is confirmed as Shorts.

3) Detect whether it’s a standard video (watch?v=) URL and extract the video ID

In case it’s not Shorts, also check the standard video URL format.

• Action: Match Text (against inputUrl)
• Regular expression:

^https?://(?:www\.|m\.)?youtube\.com/watch\?[^#]*\bv=([A-Za-z0-9_-]{11})

• If it matches, retrieve the capture group (video ID):

  • Action: Get Group from Matched Text
  • Group index: 1
  • Call the extracted ID videoId

4) Use conditional branching to build the URL to open

This is the key part of the shortcut: create a YouTube-app URL depending on which ID you have.

4-1) If a Shorts ID was obtained

• Condition: shortsId has any value
• Action: URL
• Content:

vnd.youtube://youtube.com/shorts/{shortsId}?

Treat this as openUrl.

4-2) If it’s not Shorts and a standard video ID was obtained

• Condition: videoId has any value
• Action: URL
• Content:

vnd.youtube://youtu.be/{videoId}

This is also openUrl.

4-3) If neither ID was obtained (fallback)

The URL might be in an unexpected format (non-standard share URL, different domain, unusual parameters, etc.). In this case, replace only the URL scheme (https://, etc.) with vnd.youtube:// and try launching the app.

• Action: Replace Text

• Input: inputUrl

• Replacement (Regex enabled):

  • Find: ^[^:]+\://
  • Replace with: vnd.youtube://

Call the result fallbackUrlText.

Then:

• Action: URL
• Content: fallbackUrlText

This becomes the fallback openUrl.

5) Open the final URL

Finally, open the URL created above (openUrl).

• Action: Open URLs
• Target: openUrl

Summary: What this shortcut enables

• Open YouTube Shorts directly in the YouTube app
• For standard videos (watch?v=), extract the ID and reliably open in the app
• Even for unexpected URL formats, attempt to launch the app by swapping the scheme