Can I use core spotlight indexing together with app intents? I want to use the in app search from core spotlight with everything that the app intents feature offers
Asked on 2025-07-12
1 search
Yes, you can use Core Spotlight indexing together with App Intents to enhance the search and action capabilities of your app. Core Spotlight allows you to donate searchable content to Spotlight, which can then be retrieved with a query. This content is stored in a private, local index on the device. With the introduction of semantic search, Core Spotlight can now understand search terms that are similar in meaning, making it more powerful.
App Intents, on the other hand, allow you to expose your app's features and actions to the system, enabling users to interact with your app's functionality through Spotlight, Siri, and other system features. By indexing your app entities in Spotlight using the new APIs, you can bring the powerful semantic search to app entities, allowing users to find and take action on your app's content more easily.
For more details, you can refer to the sessions Support semantic search with Core Spotlight and What’s new in App Intents.
Support semantic search with Core Spotlight
Learn how to provide semantic search results in your app using Core Spotlight. Understand how to make your app’s content available in the user’s private, on-device index so people can search for items using natural language. We’ll also share how to optimize your app’s performance by scheduling indexing activities. To get the most out of this session, we recommend first checking out Core Spotlight documentation on the Apple Developer website.
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.
Get to know App Intents
Learn about the App Intents framework and its increasingly critical role within Apple’s developer platforms. We’ll take you through a ground-up introduction of the core concepts: intents, entities, queries, and much more. You’ll learn how these pieces fit together and let you integrate your app through Apple’s devices, from software features like Spotlight and Shortcuts to hardware features like the Action button. We’ll also walk through how App Intents is your app’s gateway to integrating with Apple Intelligence going forward.