Apple Invites 1.8
Following the latest update of Apple’s Invites app, hosts can now manually edit the guest list to update guest responses and adjust the number of additional guests.
[…]
Elsewhere, the dashboard has been expanded with an All Events view, bringing both upcoming and past events into a single, unified interface. Sharing options have also been improved for hosts, who can now generate and download an image of their invite card.
Anyone using Apple Invites? The latest update suggests Apple wants it to be useful. When I tested briefly it failed my basic requirements so I’m leery of evaluating further.
Every time I look at this app, I can’t believe it exists: first because it seems totally unnecessary for Apple to be involved in this space, and second because the intended workflow and prioritization of features seem completely alien. Version 1.0 let guests collaborate on an Apple Music playlist, but it took until version 1.8 to be able to edit the number of guests?
And for a company so insistent on saying “no” to a thousand things to gain focus, you’d think they could at least have skipped introducing their own credit cards.
And again I have to ask myself, if SwiftUI, SwiftData etc. make it so easy to create apps for all the Apple platforms, why does such a simple app only exist for iOS? Why no macOS or iPadOS version?
This would be a great showcase app and Apple could even provide the source code as an example of “here’s how we do it”.
Previously:
3 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
Disasters like this and more fundamentally SwiftUI and xOS 26 feel more & more like AI coding failures. There doesn't seem to be a visionary human in charge and they can't get ahead of the bugs anymore.
I have a friend who uses Apple Invites for gatherings, so I get to experience it from a recipient (but not planner) perspective.
The thing I’m most taken aback by is how s l o w everything feels. Simply getting through the iCloud/FaceID login flow is a hassle, but the entire app feels molassy even beyond that gate. Too many taps, everything too slow to respond, hit from both sides. Evite in 2004 was janky, but it worked fine! This, on exponentially faster computers and connections, feels a decade behind that.
Weirdly, I think Apple Invites could be pretty good if it integrated well with the full ecosystem.
Automatic shared albums, calendar integration, iMessage, email… I don’t know, it seems like it could be good.
But it isn’t.
