The solution you are looking for — “I want to set up an automation that runs every week at a specific time, evaluates an IF/THEN condition, opens a particular app if the condition is satisfied, and then automatically taps or clicks at a specific location on the screen” — is not directly available as a standard iOS automation.
You can certainly automate the scheduled trigger and conditional logic using Apple’s Shortcuts/Automation framework. However, the difficult part is the final step: automatically performing a tap or click at a specific screen coordinate inside another app.
If you have programming or scripting experience, particularly with Python, you could investigate whether an external computer, Mac, or other automation environment can perform this task. For example, computer-based automation tools can sometimes open an application, identify elements on the screen, and simulate mouse clicks or keyboard input.
On iOS/iPadOS, however, this approach is considerably more restricted. iOS applications operate within a sandboxed security model, which prevents one application from freely controlling another application or injecting simulated touches into it. This restriction is intentional: unrestricted screen-control capabilities could potentially allow a malicious app to interact with banking apps, read sensitive information, approve transactions, or perform other actions without the user's knowledge.
Apple's Shortcuts framework can interact with apps when those apps expose supported Shortcuts actions or App Intents. But it generally cannot take arbitrary control of another app's user interface and tap an exact location on the screen.
There are accessibility-related mechanisms on Apple platforms that can perform certain automated interactions, but they are not equivalent to giving a third-party automation script unrestricted control of the entire iPhone UI. Their capabilities and restrictions depend on the specific task and iOS version.
Therefore, the practical possibilities are:
- Use Shortcuts for the weekly schedule and IF/THEN logic.
- Use an App Shortcut/App Intent, if the target application provides one, instead of simulating a screen tap.
- If the app has an API, webhook, or URL scheme, use that to trigger the required action directly.
- If the action absolutely requires a physical screen tap at a particular location, consider running the automation on a Mac or PC, where UI automation tools have substantially greater control.
- If you are comfortable with programming, Python-based automation on a computer may be possible, although the exact method will depend on the application and operating system.
So, the key limitation is not the weekly schedule or IF/THEN logic. Those are relatively straightforward. The real obstacle is the requirement to open another iOS app and programmatically simulate a tap at a particular screen position. iOS's security and sandboxing architecture deliberately limits that type of cross-application control.
