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App shortcuts overview Stay organized with collections Save and categorize content based on your preferences.

As a developer, you can define shortcuts to perform specific actions in your app. You can display these shortcuts in a supported launcher or assistant and help your users quickly start common or recommended tasks within your app.

This documentation shows you how to create and manage app shortcuts. You can also learn some best practices to improve your shortcuts.

Shortcut types

Key actions shown using app shortcuts [Key actions shown using app shortcuts] Figure 1. Using app shortcuts, you can show key actions and instantly take users deep into your app.

Each shortcut references one or more intents, each of which launches a specific action in your app when users select the shortcut. The types of shortcuts you create for your app depend on the app's use case. Examples of actions you can express as shortcuts include the following:

Note: Only main activities—activities that handle the Intent.ACTION_MAIN action and the Intent.CATEGORY_LAUNCHER category—can have shortcuts. If an app has multiple main activities, define the set of shortcuts for each activity.

You can publish the following types of shortcuts for your app:

Display shortcuts in assistants using capabilities

Capabilities in shortcuts.xml let you declare the types of actions users can take to launch your app and jump directly to performing a specific task. For more details, see the documentation about adding capabilities.

Shortcut limitations

Most supported launchers display up to four shortcuts at a time, including both static and dynamic shortcuts. When pushing dynamic shortcuts for display on Google's surfaces, use the Google Shortcuts Integration Library to avoid being subject to the shortcut limit.

If you choose not to use the Google Shortcuts Integration Library, your app is subject to the device's limit for the number of shortcuts it supports at a time. Shortcuts published this way only appear within the Android launchers and aren't discoverable on other Google surfaces.

Note: The maximum number of shortcuts a device supports varies. Use the getMaxShortcutCountPerActivity() method to determine how many shortcuts a particular device supports.

There is no limit to the number of pinned shortcuts users can create to your app. Your app can't remove pinned shortcuts, but it can disable them.

Note: Although other apps can't access the metadata within your shortcuts, the launcher itself can access this data. Therefore, conceal sensitive user information in this metadata.

To start creating shortcuts for your app, refer to the following documentation:

For more details about operations you can perform on shortcuts, see the ShortcutManager API reference documentation.

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Content and code samples on this page are subject to the licenses described in the Content License. Java and OpenJDK are trademarks or registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates.

Last updated 2026-09-16 UTC.

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