The Clips app is no longer being updated, and will no longer be available for download for new users as of October 10, 2025. You can continue to use Clips on iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 or earlier.
Save your Clips videos to your photo library or another location. You can save videos with any effects you might have added in Clips or save individual clips without effects. Then, watch your videos in other apps like Photos or make new videos with individual clips using iMovie or other third-party apps like InShot, VN Video Editor, and GoPro Quik.
I apparently recorded 19 seconds of test video in Clips in 2017, when it was introduced, but haven’t thought about it since editing Julio Ojeda-Zapata’s review (see “Apple’s New Clips App Is iMovie for the Social Age,” 26 April 2017). Although Julio liked Clips at the time, it didn’t seem to resonate with users, perhaps because it was never clear what you were supposed to do with the videos you created. That may have been because Clips emerged during an awkward transitional period after Twitter shut down Vine in October 2016, but before TikTok launched in September 2017 and gained popularity several years later. Even then, Apple didn’t pivot Clips to directly integrate with TikTok or support other short-form video services, such as YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, or Snapchat Spotlight. The failure of Clips could be another case of Apple failing to understand social media, or maybe there’s a larger issue of some Apple teams lacking the entrepreneurial drive to keep their apps competitive by evolving them to adapt to ecosystem changes and user needs. Which other Apple apps might be in danger of following Clips to the app graveyard?
Here’s the thing. I sometimes take multiple short videos in portrait mode. With Clips, it’s easy to string them together and - voila - you have a nice consolidated movie, in portrait mode. And you can trim things too.
Is it as expansive as iMove? No. But for quickly putting together multiple portrait mode videos shot on your iPhone it’s super easy. I just did this the other night when my dog, Pao, escaped the house and I wanted to show people: https://photos.app.goo.gl/vjqhjjz2Lgycgw7K7
The problem with doing it in iMovie (and please do correct me if I’m wrong and there is a better way of handling it) is that it seems to be built for landscape mode. If you create a movie from portrait mode movies then at the end you have to rescale, making sure to get the correct ratio, otherwise it displays too tiny on the iPhone screen. And when you do the rescaling it becomes a little blurry.
So what’s our best solution going forward for quickly stringing together multiple portrait mode videos like I did above?
Thats my biggest complaint about iMovie, how it defaults to landscape mode. I export the video to FCP and finish it off there. Unfortunately, FCP requires a subscription.
I tried going to the Apple Feedback page, but it’s not accepting feedback on Clips anymore. The icon is there, but clicking on it just reloads the page.
Well. I searched my newish iPhone 16, and there was this app called “Clips.” Who knew?
And I think that may be the point. If I had seen Julio’s review in 2017, I might have tried it as @ace did. I tried it last evening, and apart from turning myself into various cartoon characters live on video in a way that could have gotten me into judicial trouble had I been an attorney during the pandemic, I could not for the life of me figure out how I might use it today, in 2025.
Some might be finding it useful or even making a living from it, but to me it feels like a crufty appendage in the iOS toolbox.
Yes, I think that’s an apt reference. When I saw eWorld demo’ed at a long-ago MacWorld Boston, it was cheek-by-jowl with eMate 300. That plucky little device was expunged with the rest of the Newton line when Steve Jobs made his triumphant return to Apple the following year.
The eMate and eWorld were part of a watercolor/dashed line aesthetic that Apple was hoping would make inroads into the education market. Without Newton, eWorld made no sense, especially because America Online was enjoying its last big wave of popularity before being swamped by Netscape and the open Internet.
Or at least, that’s how I remember it. I remember eMate better thanks to Mactracker.
Wouldn’t it be great if Apple rolled the Clip features into the iOS version of iMovie?
That said, if Apple isn’t taking feedback on Clips anymore, maybe you can submit feature requests for iMovie which include better Portrait Mode support, and some of the Clips features like auto-captioning, etc.
The “too little and too late” comment is oh, so accurate. Apple has done so many things so well over the years that it is jarring to note the skidmarks in the parking lot outside the online world door that represent their attempts to find a way in to social media and pre-social media over their existence.
When they decided to focus on making their main www.apple.com Website a premier experience (which in my humble opinion it mostly is) I think it was a wise but humiliating concession to their ineptitude with anything that couldn’t be directly controlled by them. Even on their site, it’s a major flaw that opinions questioning their choices or the superiority of their products seem to be censored ruthlessly.
Say what you will about SM platforms like Facebook, but they continue to draw hordes of users because of the appearance that they will let those users post what they will. AOL before it, and the many electronic bulletin boards before that, similarly provided at least some areas where nothing was out of bounds. (And yes, I’m aware of the dark side of that, but it remains a reality.)
I did find that a better way to get iMovie to create portrait mode videos is to use the File → New App Preview project instead of File → New Movie. Then import your portrait videos shot on your phone and exporting out keeps everything in the right ratio.
I remember eMate better thanks to 
