How to share to airtable on mobile (ios)

[Matt_Roberts]

Why can’t I save a webpage or anything i suppose to an airtable base using the share module on ios? Notion and other similar products allow it

[M_k]

Hi @Matt_Roberts

The iOS version on mobile devices, does not have as many options as there are with the desktop version.

One of them is the ability to share a base with others.

Hope this might clear up a few things, eventhough it might not be the answer you are looking for.

Mary Kay

[Matt_Roberts]

Thanks for the response. I really appreciate it

I see this as a big oversight, not not include the ability to ‘save’ things to an airtable base on mobile. This is a feature that notion has.

Do you know if this is part of the roadmap?

[ScottWorld · Accepted solution]

Welcome to the community, @Matt_Roberts.

Every Airtable base is a custom base, so there’s no standard share sheet extension that Airtable could offer that would work for everyone.

However, you can easily create your own custom Share Sheet extension to send data to Airtable using the iOS Shortcuts App.

This uses Airtable’s REST API, so you can actually do anything that the Airtable REST API supports (i.e. create, read, update, delete).

Below is a screenshot of an example of how this could look in the iOS share sheet, and you could create as many of these as you need for different Airtable scenarios:

There is an instructional video on how to do this here:

Hope this helps! If this answers your question, could you please mark this comment as the solution to your question? This will help other people who have a similar question. :slightly_smiling_face:

[Matt_Roberts]

I’ve got to give it to you @ScottWorld, that’s good enough for me. Thanks for the workaround :winking_face:

It seems an oversight from airtable

[ScottWorld]

You’re welcome! :slightly_smiling_face:

Yeah, Airtable doesn’t have great mobile support (the mobile app can only do a small fraction of what the desktop web app can do), so I don’t know if we’ll ever see deeper iOS integration from Airtable.

Luckily, you can customize at least a few Airtable tasks yourself with the Shortcuts app, thanks to Airtable’s API.

It might take a few frustrating hours to setup your first Shortcut, but that video above gives some good tips on how to do it.

Although he does make a few things more complex than they need to be in that video. For example, you don’t need to store your API key as a separate document like he does… you can just manually type in your API key.

[Justin_Barrett]

The iOS shortcut system that @ScottWorld mentioned is a great way to pull this off.

Frankly, though, I don’t see how Airtable could support a single “save this webpage to Airtable” function. As Scott mentioned earlier, each base is different. There’s no consistent structure that every base follows, so I don’t see how they could build a single extension that would reliably put the webpage (or other) information into the base.

Let’s look at another example: Evernote. Evernote’s notes are pretty generic storage spaces. When sending data to Evernote, you can specify inside the app itself where you want it to store incoming notes, and virtually any app can dump things in without much effort. A note is a pretty empty canvas for lots of different types of content.

Airtable isn’t quite like that. It’s not (currently) designed to take information and dump it into any specific place. Could it be? Perhaps, but which base should it go into? Which table in that base? Which field in that table? When sending data to Airtable this way, what data is captured? Just the URL, or some of the page contents as well? There are so many options that it’s probably difficult to design a single extension to account for all of that.

Is it an oversight? Maybe. But I also take into account the size of the Airtable dev team compared to other services. I had the pleasure of visiting Airtable HQ last year, and I gotta say that I’m impressed with how much they do with such a small core crew. Because of that knowledge, I tend to cut them some slack when things aren’t exactly as one might hope.

[ScottWorld]

@Justin_Barrett That’s super cool that you got to visit the team in person! Where is Airtable HQ located?

[Justin_Barrett]

@ScottWorld The main office is in San Francisco. Really fun place, and the team is awesome all around (and I’m not just saying that because I’m writing in their community). I’m sure it’s grown a bit since I was there last April, but it’s a surprisingly small crew for such a popular product.

[M_k]

Hi @ScottWorld

Where is this screen share on a mobile device?

Is it part of a shortcut?

How to go about creating this shortcut?

Inquiring minds would like to know! :grinning:

Thank you,
Mary