What's new in App Intents?
Generated on 8/8/2024
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What's New in App Intents?
App Intents have received several updates and enhancements in the latest WWDC. Here are 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 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).
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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).
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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).
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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).
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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.
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.
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.