What's the latest in App Intents?
Generated on 5/19/2025
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The latest updates in App Intents were discussed in the session titled "What’s new in App Intents" at WWDC 2024. Some of the key highlights include:
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Spotlight Integration: New APIs have been introduced that allow developers to index their app entities in Spotlight, enhancing the search capabilities and making it easier for users to find relevant content within apps. This integration brings powerful semantic search to app entities.
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Universal Links: App intent types now support universal links, allowing devices to take users directly to specific locations within an app, improving the user experience.
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Developer Experience Improvements: There have been enhancements to make it easier for developers to work with app intents, streamlining the process of integrating app features with system experiences like Siri and Spotlight.
For more detailed information, you can refer to the session What’s new in App Intents (00:01:16) which covers these updates in depth.
Platforms State of the Union
Discover the newest advancements on Apple platforms.
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.
Extend your app’s controls across the system
Bring your app’s controls to Control Center, the Lock Screen, and beyond. Learn how you can use WidgetKit to extend your app’s controls to the system experience. We’ll cover how you can to build a control, tailor its appearance, and make it configurable.
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.
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.
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.