What's new in App Intents?

What's New in App Intents?

App Intents have received several updates and enhancements in the latest WWDC. Here are the key highlights:

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).
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).
Universal Links:
- One of the new features is the support for universal links, which allows the device to take you directly to where you need to be in your app (What’s new in App Intents).
Developer Experience Improvements:
- There are improvements to make it easier to work with app intents, enhancing the overall developer experience (What’s new in App Intents).
Integration with Siri:
- Siri can now invoke any item from your app's menus, making it more flexible and intelligent. This includes enhanced conversational capabilities (Platforms State of the Union).
Guidance on Designing App Intents:
- Updated guidance on how to design app intents to work well across various system experiences, including the action button, squeeze widgets, controls, and Siri (Design App Intents for system experiences).
Core Features Exposure:
- App intents allow you to lift your app's features out of the app and elevate them to other places on the device, such as Spotlight, Siri, widgets, and Control Center (Bring your app’s core features to users with App Intents).

For a detailed walkthrough of these updates, you can refer to the session What’s new in App Intents.