How to Zip or Unzip Files on iPhone with Siri Shortcuts

Updated Nov 30,2018 | by Cody

There are times that you need to zip or unzip files on iPhone or iPad. The new Files app still does not include a built-in feature for making or extracting archive. Luckily, Apple has provided a system level feature Siri Shortcuts to help you zip or unzip any file anywhere.

You can use Shortcuts to unzip an archive file in an email attachment or zip a large file to before attaching to an email. If you have Google Drive app installed on your iOS device, you can also unzip files in Google Drive on your iPhone without downloading third-party app.

Siri Shortcuts was officially introduced in WWDC 2018 along with the release of iOS 12. Basically, Siri Shortcuts will suggest you make a shortcut of the tasks you do regularly, so you can perform common tasks on the Lock screen or in Search without opening any apps.

You can also download the Shortcuts app to create custom shortcuts. Of course, from the app, you can download a few pre-made shortcuts. You can also add a shortcut to Siri, so you can run any shortcut by asking Siri.

In order to unzip or zip a file, you can simply get this pre-made shortcut Zip or Unzip. This Shortcut is available in Share Sheet, so you will be able to unzip any file on your iPhone. For example, let’s unzip email attachment on iPhone.

Step 1. Download the Shortcuts app if you haven’t and get the Zip or Unzip shortcut. Open the link in Safari to download the shortcut for unzipping files.

Step 2. Locate the email attachment that you want to unzip, and tap on the Share button.

Step 3. From the Share Sheet, tap on More and toggle on the option Shortcuts. Then you can select Shortcuts from the Share Sheet.

Step 4. Select Shortcut and run the Zip or Unzip shortcut.

Step 5. Then the email attachment will be unzipped soon. When it is done, you will have three option to decide what to do with the extracted file. In this case, it is an image file, so I choose Share to save it to Camera Roll.

The Share option will bring you to Share Sheet. You can choose to save the file, open it in another app, or share it with your friend.

The Save to Files option allows you to pick a location in the Files app to save the extracted file.

The Open in option, as its suggested, simply allows you to open this file with in another app, which is very useful for documents files. You can use this option to open the file in the corresponding app to view it.

This shortcut is called Zip or Unzip, so you can also use it to zip any file and save it to Files app. Of course, if needed, you can also choose to share the zipped file.

As mentioned before, you can select a file and run this shortcut from Share Sheet to zip files on iPhone. If the file you want zip are saved in cloud drive, then you can open the Shortcuts and run this shortcut. It will bring you Files app Document Picker for you to choose a file to make archive.

If you want to zip or unzip multiple files on iPhone in one go, then get this shortcut. When applying the zip or unzip action to multiple files, I think you don’t want to get prompted one by one, so this shortcut does not contain that many options. You can modify the shortcut to meet your needs.

Shortcuts app support many archive formats including zip, tar, gz, cpio, and iso. Unfortunately, it does not support rar. If you want to extract archive file formatted as rar, you can transfer iPhone files to your PC or use another free app like Documents by Readdle. 

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