Apple Invites
Apple (MacRumors, Hacker News):
Apple today introduced Apple Invites, a new app for iPhone that helps users create custom invitations to gather friends and family for any occasion. With Apple Invites, users can create and easily share invitations, RSVP, contribute to Shared Albums, and engage with Apple Music playlists. Starting today, users can download Apple Invites from the App Store, or access it on the web through icloud.com/invites. iCloud+ subscribers can create invitations, and anyone can RSVP, regardless of whether they have an Apple Account or Apple device.
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With Apple Intelligence, creating unique event invitations is easy. Users can tap in to the built-in Image Playground experience to produce original images using concepts, descriptions, and people from their photo library.
We’ve been using Paperless Post, which works pretty well, and from that perspective Apple’s solution looks nice but seems rather odd. It doesn’t really handle the most important step of actually inviting people. I expect to be able to enter a bunch of names and addresses, and have my wife do the same, and then when we both think the list is done we press a button and it e-mails everyone.
Apple Invites doesn’t seem to allow for multiple hosts. Is one of us supposed to log into the other’s iCloud account using a private Safari window? More importantly, it doesn’t send a bulk e-mail. Rather, each time you add someone it opens a share sheet so that you can e-mail the person individually. It doesn’t make a pretty e-mail; it just puts a bare link into the body field and you have to fill in everything else—even the subject—separately for each invitee.
There is an option to Send a Note, but this only e-mails the people who have RSVP’d. There is no way to see who has received the e-mail or to remind the ones who haven’t responded. There’s also no way to update the names after the invitation has been sent (e.g. to keep track of who from each party is attending), nor a way to export (or import) the address list data. The invitees can’t see the names of who was invited. And it’s cumbersome to RSVP because you have to type your e-mail address, wait for a confirmation code to be sent, and then type it in (no magic link to click). Or, if there’s an Apple account associated with the e-mail address, you have to log in.
I see the “job to be done” as “help me create and send a nice e-mail and manage the list of people throughout the process.” It feels like Apple thought it was “demo Image Playground and promote Apple’s various services.” It’s also frustrating that Apple is launching another new app that doesn’t have a Mac or iPad version.
The app can generate full-screen graphics for invitations to any sort of event. The invitations allow you to mix a combination of photos and AI-generated images that are combined with details about the event and the Memojis of the people you invite. There are multiple font choices, the option to add a playlist from Apple Music, and sections for draft invitations, upcoming events, events you’re hosting, those you’re attending, plus past and upcoming events. Invitees can send notes back to the sender too.
An iPhone user can send you an invitation either via email or through a direct link. On opening the the invite, you’ll be asked to enter an email address and verify that email. You can then enter your RSVP status and see details about the event including (as the event date nears) the weather. There’s also a map location and you can see a list of other attendees.
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Since there’s no Apple Invites app on Android, you’ll instead have the option to download the calendar event file and add it to the calendar app of your choice. This works well enough, but we noticed that the iCloud invites link in the event is entirely generic, where if you save an event to Apple’s Calendar app on iOS, you get a direct link to this specific event. This doesn’t change if you’re signed into an iCloud account.
Another drawback is that you can’t use or even view photos without an iCloud account. Photo sharing is perhaps the biggest draw of Apple Invites over alternatives, so this is a bit of a frustrating hurdle for those who aren’t using an iPhone.
Apple Invites looks basic but good. The ability to automatically create a shared iCloud Photo Library amongst participants, however, is absolutely MONEY. Great idea.
I look forward to seeing all the great new APIs available to developers to allow them fairly compete with Apple’s new subscriber-only Invites app, like its seamless shared photo albums feature, just like they’re required to by law here!
Invites follows this trend by integrating with features and data from a whopping six other pre-installed Apple apps.
Who else here remembers the OG Apple Invites app: Cards...
Previously:
