What’s new with app intents?

Apple introduced several updates and enhancements to App Intents at WWDC 2024. Here are some of the key highlights:

1. 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).

2. 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).

3. 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).

4. 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).

5. 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).

6. 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).

7. 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.