Streamline Event Planning with New Apple Invites Service

Originally published at: Streamline Event Planning with New Apple Invites Service - TidBITS

Whenever Apple releases a new app like Clips, Journal, or Freeform that’s unlikely to appeal to most Apple users, I wonder what internal discussions led to its development, especially when it’s entering a crowded space. With the new Apple Invites, the answer is slightly more apparent: to encourage iCloud+ subscriptions to boost Services revenue. But will people use it over established invitation services like Evite or Paperless Post? Or just plain email or texts?

Apple Invites helps you create event invitations, invite people, play music at the event, and collect photos. It’s focused on social events—you wouldn’t use it to organize a business meeting. Anyone can respond to an invitation regardless of whether they have the Apple Invites app, an Apple Account, or even an Apple device. However, event creation is limited to iCloud+ subscribers and joins other iCloud+ features like expanded iCloud storage, Private Relay, Hide My Email, HomeKit Secure Video, and custom email domains.

Apple Invites: Splash screens

Apple Invites is available for iPhones running iOS 18 and through iCloud.com. Although the Web app appears identical to the iPhone app, no dedicated iPad or Mac app exists. Unlike competing invitation services that offer free tiers with paid upgrades to remove ads and add features, Apple Invites requires an iCloud+ subscription for any event creation but has no ads. iCloud+ subscriptions start at $0.99 per month for 50 GB of storage. There is no limit on the number of events you can create or guests you can invite.

Creating and Sharing an Event

The event creation workflow in Apple Invites is straightforward. First, you give your event a name, set a date and an optional time, and specify a location. Next, you can customize the invitation by adding a background. Apple offers a selection of pre-made images, but you can also use a photo from your library or create one with Image Playground if you have access to Apple Intelligence. Additionally, you can enhance the event by attaching an Apple Music playlist, allowing attendees to listen and contribute songs. Finally, you can set up an iCloud Shared Album where everyone involved can upload and view photos from the event.

Apple Invites: Creating an event

After you create your event, it’s time to share it. You can either create and share a public link or invite people directly—it’s similar to sharing in other Apple apps. Apple Invites enables you to build a list of frequent invitees, but you can also search through all your contacts. Invitations are managed entirely via URLs, which open in any Web browser. Guests must enter an email address to RSVP; if it matches an Apple Account, they’ll need to sign in. Otherwise, they must verify it by entering a six-digit code sent to that address.

Apple Invites: Guest invitation

Managing Guest Responses

After signing into an Apple Account or verifying an email, guests can view details and RSVP by clicking the Guest List tile. Note the small calendar icon at the top. Clicking it will download an ICS file to add the event to a calendar.

Apple Invites: Guest view

Clicking the Guest List tile opens a dialog that allows the guest to indicate their attendance plans, which they can change at any time. They can also tweak their name (“Adam’s Doppelganger” was originally my test email address) and add a note explaining their response or providing additional information. I’m not wild about the darkness of the interface; I had trouble seeing the Submit link in the upper-right corner when the dialog was set against the dark brown of the screen.

Apple Invites: Guest response

As people begin to RSVP, the host receives notifications, and the Guest List starts to fill up. Anyone can see who else is coming, but only the host can remove people from the event. Interestingly, only those with Apple Accounts seem to be permitted to invite others here. Once again, there’s a notable lack of interface contrast with the View Information pop-up that appears when you tap the ••• button next to a guest.

Apple Invites: Guest list controls for the host

Hosts can send messages to all attendees who have RSVPed. I suspect that guests with the app receive a push notification, but those without it receive an email that requires clicking through to iCloud instead of simply displaying the text in the message.

Apple Invites: Email notification of a host note

My event has yet to happen, and I wouldn’t enable Apple Music or an iCloud Shared Album for a simple dinner anyway, so I can’t comment on those experiences. However, I suspect they’re fine since they’re based on longstanding Apple systems.

Host Controls and Settings

The remaining tools available to the host are more interesting. At the top of the screen, a calendar button adds the event to your calendar. Next to it is a ••• button that provides options for editing the event, duplicating it—a nice touch for events that are likely to recur—and adjusting event settings.

Apple Invites: Host tools

These settings include allowing individuals to bring extra guests—the Guest List tile updates to enable guests to indicate if they’re bringing a plus-one, and they can modify their description to clarify. The Approve Guests option would be helpful if a public link were shared more widely than anticipated. If a photo background poses a privacy concern, it can be removed from the invitation until guests have accessed it with a verified email address or through a private link. Additionally, a description of the background can be added for those utilizing a screen reader. Lastly, the host has the option to duplicate the event, cancel it, or pause replies.

Apple Invites: Bringing an additional guest

Final Thoughts

I’m quite impressed with Apple Invites. I expected it to be a somewhat cheesy app that lacked key features or was difficult to use effectively outside the Apple ecosystem. Instead, Apple appears to have done a solid job of considering what’s necessary for both hosts and guests.

A possible omission is a built-in way for guests to communicate with the host or the entire group. However, in many situations, guests can respond to the host using the same channel through which they received the invitation link. Those who joined via a public link may not have a direct connection to the host, but they can always view the host’s email address by clicking the settings icon at the top right of the Web interface. Nevertheless, setting a description may be all that’s necessary in most instances.

While it’s easy to suggest that Apple Invites provide full group communication, upon reflection, that might not be a good idea. Since it works across platforms, Apple Invites only knows guest email addresses. If it were to enable chat within the invitation, email notifications of new messages could quickly become bothersome.

The main hurdle to the adoption of Apple Invites may be that invitations will only come from Apple users. It’s not that Apple Invites won’t work for those outside the Apple ecosystem; it’s that many Apple users may hesitate to use something that feels Apple-focused with friends and family who don’t own Apple devices. I often feel reluctant to use an Apple-focused service like Shared iCloud Albums with non-Apple friends—although I don’t intend it as a push to convert them to a different platform, I worry it could be perceived that way. Additionally, my experience is that many individuals who don’t use Apple devices view them as overly expensive and somewhat elitist. While they don’t comment on my usage, they might see it as presumptuous for me to expect them to use an Apple service.

If you’re less reluctant about feeling like you’re imposing Apple services on non-Apple users than I am, give Apple Invites a try and let us know how it works for you.

1 Like

This feels like one of those services they pad the subscription with so that in a year or so, they can increase the price and point to all the great features you get with it. Classic bundling circular reasoning.

Having said that, it also seems like the Mac continues to be a second class citizen with Apple software development. I don’t have an iPhone that supports Apple Intelligence, but I have a Mac that does. But no Mac app.

It seems all software Apple develops these days is for iPhone only, which would be OK if the Mac got some Mac-specific attention as well. But it seems the opposite is happening.

This really feels like a solution in search of a problem, like a tech demo of the other things Apple has made lately that are solutions in search of problems, like SwiftUI and Image Playground.

Apple hasn’t changed iCloud+ pricing (which is basically about storage) since 2015, and the changes before that made it more competitively priced rather than less, so it doesn’t feel to me like there’s a play to increase the value of the service to increase prices. I think Apple just wants to get more people paying for iCloud+ to start and encourage those who are paying to stay loyal.

The lack of a Mac or iPad app doesn’t surprise me. The iCloud Web app is exactly what we’d see on the Mac and iPad, and vastly more people use iPhones than either of the other two. You could make a Safari Web app of it easily if you wanted, but I doubt that many people organize so many events that it’s worth doing. The only Apple Intelligence connection is for using Image Playground to generate event backgrounds, so you’re really not missing out on much.

I’m not sure on what data you’re basing the statement “all software Apple develops these days is for iPhone only.” Some things appear first on the iPhone, and some features are hardware-specific (Camera Control on the iPhone, Apple Pencil on the iPad), but the vast majority of what Apple does—nearly all of Apple Intelligence, for instance—is available on the Mac and the iPad as well. To an extent, a focus on the iPhone makes sense since it really is where Apple makes over 50% of its revenue, whereas the Mac is 7%, but everything Apple is doing with the M series shows that it’s serious about the Mac.

One never knows what the internal discussions that led to Apple Invites were like, but I wonder if the existing invitation services were just so trashy with ads and upsells that Apple felt it could do it better and boost Services a bit in the process.

5 Likes

So are more people expected to use this than Clips?

If iCloud+ is supposed to become more attractive in order to extract larger revenue for Apple Services, I suggest putting Safari behind the iCloud+ paywall too. And yes, Mail too while they’re at it. Surely, 99¢ per month is nothing for such a high-performance browser plus email client thrown in there too for free. Nobody would be forced to use it either, after all there’s Firefox and iCloud has a web email interface.

Apple, because it’s you, and only for you, I’ll accept hardware donations in lieu of royalties for this genius business plan. DM me for the delivery address. :crazy_face:

iCloud e-mail has a standard IMAP interface. So you can use literally any IMAP-compatible e-mail client with it. For example, I have an installation of Mozilla Thunderbird configured to access mine.

See also: iCloud Mail server settings for other email client apps - Apple Support

1 Like

A major part of creating an event is choosing a mutually acceptable date. I would like to have seen this feature included in Apple’s Invites.

1 Like

Those features are great, but Apple Invites seems focused entirely on social events, not the kind of meetings where When2Meet or crab.fit (which I use regularly) would be necessary to find a mutually acceptable date. If I’m going to throw a party, I’m going to set when it is, not poll my friends to see when they can make it. I think it would radically complicate the Apple Invites workflow to build in the polls and necessary communication around them.

@mjtsai has some good criticisms of Apple Invites at Michael Tsai - Blog - Apple Invites, including:

  • Apple Invites doesn’t do much for actually sending invitations. I think that’s intentional because people have a lot of ways of communicating, so relying solely on email wouldn’t work for many, especially younger folks who don’t check email reliably. I like how it focuses on a URL, so you can share it any way you like—that was the brilliance behind Zoom compared to FaceTime.

  • Because of not handling invites, there’s no way to communicate with invitees, only those who have RSVPed. That’s a fair point—you can’t really change the invite and alert people—but it follows logically from not managing the invitations themselves. You can’t have a public link option and be able to communicate with those people.

  • No option for multiple hosts, which is a fancy way of saying that both people in a couple might want to have the host view on the event. Totally fair, though when we throw a party, one of us always ends up taking the lead on managing the invitations and responses.

I’ll be curious if Apple Invites catches on, but honestly, between restricting event creation to iCloud+ subscribers (of which there a lot, but it’s certainly not everyone) and the worry about plugging Apple services to non-Apple users, I will be surprised if it does.

1 Like

I agree with you Adam if I was hosting a party but with my family and friends, choosing the date for other social events (such as a trip or a meal in a restaurant) often involves a lot of to-and-fro. It would be nice to have this as an option.

Right, this isn’t anything my wife and I would need. One of us takes responsibility for managing the invitations and the number of people coming.

I think what I like about Apple’s solution, from what I have seen described of it, is what I like about a lot of Apple’s solutions: compared with a service like evite, Apple isn’t going to try to monetize my activity. But the proof will be when one of us actually tries this - maybe Independence Day this year, when we usually host the extended family at our summer place.

I like that Apple occasionally drops a new application / service completely unexpectedly, even if I’m unlikely to use it. The sports scores app was another one.

I don’t quite understand the “revenue extraction” criticism – Apple’s making your iCloud subscription potentially more valuable. Why is that a problem?

2 Likes

Excellent points, and it was perhaps a “hot take” as they say.

I only really mean that it seems that new software focuses on iOS and the iOS/iPadOS philosophy in general, to the detriment of more traditional models. This is perhaps a minor individual example, I just mean that I feel the start of a trend.

I do appreciate that the Mac does still get some attention, but it feels that Apple’s intention in the near future is for it to be more like a desktop platform for running iOS style apps, again to the detriment of the specific advantages to the traditional desktop/laptop form factor/“paradigm.”

Maybe a little off-topic to the launch of this specific app. But as 9to5Mac points out this is three in a row now of iOS specific apps that Apple has recently launched, all of which are inter-links to other paid services.

I appreciate your more charitable interpretation of the existing market for these apps, and maybe I’m completely uninformed on the subject. It just seems like a strange thing for them to launch now, when everyone in the Apple world is talking about everything but the lack of an Apple-specific event invitations app.

The full app is available from a tile on iCloud.com. So the functionality should be available to any iCloud+ subscriber on any device that can open a web browser.

People don’t seem to worry about this when using Google or Microsoft services, so I feel no compunction about using Apple services when I’m sharing photos or similar. As someone who doesn’t use Google or Microsoft services, I know it can be a hassle to be on the receiving end, but if I’m managing it I need to use tools that work for me. Of course, I only do this when the Apple service actually works for non-Apple users without requiring them to jump through lots of hoops. If that’s not the case I find something that works for all of us (even if sub-optimally).

Google feels a little different to me because all Google services are available for free, and many people started using them before Android and ChromeOS even existed, so it didn’t feel as though it was a platform you had to buy into in the same you do with Apple.

The main way I sense that Microsoft gets pushed on people is through Office document compatibility, and while that is a similar buy-in scenario, Office document formats are the de facto standards.

The platforms where I occasionally run into problems are those from Meta. If someone wants to communicate with me via Facebook Messenger, or share photos via Facebook, or set up a WhatsApp group with me, I categorically refuse on the principle that I believe Meta is bad for both individuals and society as a whole, and I won’t participate.

I don’t think most people have philosophical problems with Apple as a company, but the way Apple moved from a cultish underdog to one of the most powerful and valuable companies in the world has caused some people to react negatively to being asked to use Apple services.

But hey, this is all just my perception. I should start asking my friends what they think.

1 Like