tell me about snippet intent
Asked on 06/14/2025
1 search
Snippet Intents are a part of Apple's App Intents framework, designed to create interactive and compact views that can be displayed by app intents. These snippets can show updated information and offer quick actions directly from your app, appearing in places like Spotlight, Siri, and the Shortcuts app. They are particularly useful for surfacing simple, routine tasks and information without taking users out of their current context.
To implement a Snippet Intent, it must conform to the Snippet Intent protocol. This involves adding necessary variables marked as parameters, which the system populates. The Snippet Intent can access app dependencies and render views based on the app's state and parameters. It's important to ensure that these views are rendered quickly and do not mutate the app state, as the system might run the Snippet Intent multiple times to react to changes, such as switching to dark mode.
Snippet Intents can be used to show results after an action or request confirmation. They can also be interactive, featuring elements like buttons to perform actions directly from the snippet. For example, a heart button in a snippet can run an Update Favorites Intent, ensuring the favorite status is up to date.
For more detailed information on implementing Snippet Intents, you can refer to the session Explore new advances in App Intents (00:01:50) and Design interactive snippets (00:00:07).
Explore new advances in App Intents
Explore all the new enhancements available in the App Intents framework in this year’s releases. Learn about developer quality-of-life improvements like deferred properties, new capabilities like interactive app intents snippets, entity view annotations, how to integrate Visual Intelligence, and much more. We’ll take you through how App Intents is more expressive than ever, while becoming even easier and smoother to adopt. We’ll also share exciting new clients of App Intents this year like Spotlight and Visual Intelligence, and learn to write app intents that work great in those contexts.
Design interactive snippets
Snippets are compact views invoked from App Intents that display information from your app. Now, snippets can allow your app to bring even more capability to Siri, Spotlight, and the Shortcuts app by including buttons and stateful information that offer additional interactivity as part of an intent. In this session, you’ll learn best practices for designing snippets, including guidance on layout, typography, interaction, and intent types.
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.