it's a nice idea. I tried the shortcut, but I have one question: Does the shortcut need to "phone home"?
I thought the same thing. When I first got the shortcut and before running it, I looked through the code and saw that it was trying to phone home, and thought that it might be a virus or some sort of Trojan. Having something call back to an uncertified server definitely looks like malware of some type. I think in this case it’s most likely not, it is intended to cause the shortcut to auto update if there are changes on the original, but even if the intent is positive, it does look suspicious.
Even if the shortcut payload is benign today, with the automated update it could be a sleeper-type of malware, and the future payload could be changed to perform unknown execution when the shortcut is run. I don’t know how restricted on iOS a shortcut‘s access could be. So for example I don’t know if I shortcut could blindly copy to clipboard with whatever is in the buffer and transmit it to another user, or be used to delete files or applications or things like that.
@Shun deleting the phone home code merely turns off the ability of the shortcut to auto update itself. All the functionality still works because it’s just a couple of lines passing the command Pleco.