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The iPhone’s Mail and Notes apps have both received several excellent features over the years, but there’s one notable omission—the ability to add hyperlinks. For reasons only Apple knows, Mail and Notes don’t let you embed hyperlinks in text like you can on your Mac. Sure, you can paste a URL and put it in brackets, but that takes up too much space on the screen (plus it’s unsightly). While Apple won’t fix the problem, you can fix it yourself.
How to add hyperlinks in Apple Mail and Notes on your iPhone
The trick to making usable hyperlinks is, once again, in Apple’s endlessly useful Shortcuts app. To start, make sure you have the app on your iPhone, click the following link to the Make rich text hyperlink shortcut, then choose “Get Shortcut.” Tap “Add Shortcut” on the pop-up, and you’re set.
Now, open any website in Safari on your iPhone and tap the Share button. Scroll down and select Make rich text hyperlink. The shortcut will ask you to type the text you want to embed the hyperlink under. From here, the shortcut will copy the embedded hyperlink to your clipboard. You can now open Notes or Mail, and paste your hyperlinked text along the other text.
The best feature of this shortcut is it works with all apps that support the Share Sheet. You can open Instagram or TikTok and easily create hyperlinked blocks of text to share your favorite videos, too. You can also use this shortcut independently by adding it to the Home Screen on your iPhone or firing it up from the Shortcuts app. If someone sends you a URL through iMessage or through another messaging app, you can copy it to the clipboard and run this shortcut to create an embedded hyperlink.
