Clips Discontinued
Apple has essentially discontinued Clips, its video-editing app designed to allow users to combine video clips, images, and photos with voice-based titles, music, filters, and graphics to create enhanced videos that can be shared on social media sites.
The app has been removed from the App Store, and a support document on Apple’s site says that the app is no longer being updated and would no longer be available for download for new users as of yesterday.
I never understood who Clips was for.
I would like someone at Apple to explain how the company that has the best smartphone video recording experience can’t make any good video editing apps for smartphones.
The effects, transitions and even transcribing titles in Clips were made in Motion.
Apple didn’t enable third-party toolmaking for Clips.
speaking of Apple video editors, iMovie hasn’t received new features for like three years …
Before it was pulled offline, it was most recently updated in May 2024.
I am truly curious about the likely lifespan of a few recent Apple apps. How much longer will Invites last? Sports seems like it could be around for longer, but I am a little worried about Classical, which still does not have a Mac app.
I remember covering Clips at the time of its introduction because, as ever, there were accessibility ties. To wit, Apple was boastful of the fact the app could generate real-time captions for its short-form videos; the captions were useful, of course, to Deaf and hard-of-hearing people so as to make dialogue more accessible and inclusive. Back then, I remember thinking how inspired it was given TikTok and Instagram Reels had yet to pervade the mainstream consciousness. Nowadays, the vast majority of these videos I see all have live captions enabled by default, and it’s heartening to notice the change as a lifelong disabled person who, coincidentally, has a level of congenital hearing loss.
Previously:
Update (2025-10-14): Craig Grannell:
I always rather liked Clips. It was fun, simple and creative. I used it for a few YouTube shorts. But then I liked Music Memos too – another smart little app that was also unceremoniously canned.
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.
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I used Clips a few times because iMovie somehow still doesn't support portrait video. Unfortunately from the get it had the smell of an app destined for the Apple dustbin.
Curious what people recommend for a lightweight, easy to use iPhone video editor when you need to quickly stitch together clips.
All the cool kids are on capcut, an app that exhausts me.
I used iMovie this summer for the first time in a long while and thought it needed some attention. I stil finns it weird that export is called share fex
Clips was a distraction for Apple. It's either should be span off to be a separate entity like FileMaker, along with Journal and Freeform (if, IF they can make money) or they should have included all that functionality into iMovie. It seemed obvious that it's not a keeper and will be killed two or three years later.
What does a "distraction" even mean? Apple cant afford a small team for each of these apps? Or the rest of the software they regularly mismanage and abandon for years at a time?
Another app Apple binned was Music Memo. Its two main features were a tuner and auto backing (record a some solo guitar and it would detect the chords and add bass and drums). It was very low friction which is exactly what’s needed for capturing ideas quickly.
I don’t understand Apple’s motives for making these little apps. They are generally well made but then abandoned. Maybe they were made to dog food their own APIs?
Apple’s transition from “company that makes software so good you put up with the ass hardware”, to “company that makes hardware so incredible you put up with the booty-cheeks software experience” is complete.
Passion projects, perhaps? The kind of thing one developer can put together on the side and share around internally, in the hope of a successful pitch to management? Music Memos really felt like that. Then, as always, the suits finally insisted it must go.
Is this pattern more or less common in the post-Steve era? Who has the authority to bless or euthanise such projects now? The ebb and flow makes me think it's no one in particular, just the suits doing rounds.
I liked Clips for one reason: it made it very easy and simple to pause recording video, and restart later. A seemingly simple task but impossible with the camera. You can pause video but can only restart while the camera remains active. With Clips, I could take some short footage here and there throughout a day or week and it would be all stitched together.
I never used the fancy overlays. I just wanted a simple way to add to a video later. I’d be fine with having a simple way in Photos to stitch clips together but I haven’t found a simple reliable way to do this.
It also was a fun app to introduce my kid to some very simple film making. Their Clips is filled with adorable cute “movies” and I’ll need to extract those now, knowing this.
Overall, disappointed by this news. How hard is it to maintain simple quirky little apps like this? I’d appreciate any replacement suggestions but anything I found is way too advanced and feature bloated for what I want.
