A pretty dumb but effective set-up for me.

Scrobbling Apple Music from iPhone has been wonky for a while. Apple Music doesn't have a built-in integration, and the app Finale doesn't seem to work on my ancient phone anymore. QuietScrob does work, but it needs to run in the background, so if I'm listening to Apple Music and haven't thought to open QuietScrob, then nothing is making it to Last.fm.

It should be possible to set something in the Shortcuts app so that QuietScrob opens in the background every time Apple Music is opened, but there's no mechanism to open an app in the background. I've seen posts where people ask for the feature, and it's ignored or met with dubious glances at best.

Luckily for me, I like to dumb-ify my phone in various ways, e.g., making app icons grayscale and disabling features. One of these techniques is using an app launcher called Smile. This declutters my home screen and brings the apps I want to use most frequently front and center in a simple text list.

Since Shortcuts can't open an app in the background, I set things up as follows:

1. The Smile launcher link labeled "Apple Music" actually opens QuietScrob via the URL scheme quietscrob:.
2. The Shortcuts app runs the following automation: When QuietScrob is opened, open Apple Music.

It's that simple. That and about $4 to unlock unlimited scrobbles with QuietScrob. Of course, Mavis Pro would eliminate the need, but that's $10 (potentially more for advanced features), and I don't think I'm ready for that. The only potential issue is if I actually need to get into the settings for QuietScrob, but it'll be easy enough to disable the automation if that time comes.