What’s new with app intents?
Generated on 7/23/2024
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Apple introduced several updates and enhancements to App Intents at WWDC 2024. Here are some of the key highlights:
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Expanded Functionality: Previously, app intents were meant to be the most habitual tasks in your app that could be useful outside of your app. In iOS 18, this guidance has changed to go beyond common functionality. Now, anything your app does should be an app intent (Design App Intents for system experiences).
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Spotlight Integration: New APIs allow you to index your app entities in Spotlight, bringing powerful semantic search to app intents (What’s new in App Intents).
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Universal Links: One of the new features for app intent types is universal links, which can take users directly to where they need to be in your app (What’s new in App Intents).
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Developer Experience Improvements: There are several improvements to make it easier to work with app intents, including better tools and documentation (What’s new in App Intents).
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Siri Integration: App intents are now a powerful way for your app to tap into Apple intelligence, including Siri's enhanced conversational capabilities. Siri can now invoke any item from your app's menus without additional work (Platforms State of the Union).
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Background Capabilities: If your app supports live activities, audio playback, or recording, you can create app intents that make it possible to perform these actions from the background (Design App Intents for system experiences).
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Parameter Summaries: App intents now include parameter summaries, which are essential for people to understand what your app intent does when exploring in the shortcuts drawer (Design App Intents for system experiences).
For a comprehensive overview, you can watch the session What’s new in App Intents.
What’s new in App Intents
Learn about improvements and all-new features with App Intents, and discover how this framework can help you expose your app’s functionality to Siri, Spotlight, Shortcuts, and more. We’ll show you how to make your entities more meaningful to the platform with the Transferable API, File Representations, new IntentFile APIs, and Spotlight Indexing, opening up powerful functionality in Siri and the Shortcuts app. Empower your intents to take people deep into your app with URL Representable Entities. Explore new techniques to model your entities and intents with new APIs for error handling and union values.
Bring your app’s core features to users with App Intents
Learn the principles of the App Intents framework, like intents, entities, and queries, and how you can harness them to expose your app’s most important functionality right where people need it most. Find out how to build deep integration between your app and the many system features built on top of App Intents, including Siri, controls and widgets, Apple Pencil, Shortcuts, the Action button, and more. Get tips on how to build your App Intents integrations efficiently to create the best experiences in every surface while still sharing code and core functionality.
Platforms State of the Union
Discover the newest advancements on Apple platforms.
Bring your app to Siri
Learn how to use App Intents to expose your app’s functionality to Siri. Understand which intents are already available for your use, and how to create custom intents to integrate actions from your app into the system. We’ll also cover what metadata to provide, making your entities searchable via Spotlight, annotating onscreen references, and much more.
Design App Intents for system experiences
App Intents power system experiences in controls, Spotlight, Siri, and more. Find out how to identify the functionality that’s best for App Intents, and how to use parameters to make these intents flexible. Learn how to use App Intents to allow people to take action outside your app, and see examples of when to navigate into your app to show contextual information.