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Mobile app interactivity, multimodal voice technology, and AI are all converging with Apple Intelligence — Apple’s new artificial intelligence feature set announced at this year’s WWDC, coming soon with iOS 18 (maybe in October). And the secret sauce powering those awesome interactions is something called App Intents.
App Intents exist within the iPhone’s operating system, allowing your mobile app to perform specific tasks directly through Siri or the iPhone’s search function. These intents, which can be developed today using Xcode and existing iOS SDKs, are individual actions that can be voice-activated or triggered automatically based on certain conditions (e.g., place my favorite morning coffee order at a specific time and at a specific local drive-thru, but only on days that I’m commuting to the office).
Currently, the Shortcuts app enables the automation of these App Intents and the building of a pipeline of intents to accomplish a given task. Still, it takes some annoying manual programming that most average users simply aren’t going to do. Apple Intelligence will change all that.
I wrote about this briefly in my WWDC breakdown, but here’s a deeper dive…
App Intents functionality will enable users to execute actions quickly without navigating and doing a bunch of stuff within the app's interface. This is not only an opportunity to elevate your brand's digital strategy, it’s going to be an essential part of making sure your app can participate with the new features of the Apple ecosystem and remains relevant in the coming age of Apple Intelligence. If you don’t have App Intents configured, it simply ain’t gonna happen, and competitors with a solid App Intents execution are gonna eat your lunch!
If you don’t feel like reading all of this Nerd Stuff below, this brief video offers a peek under the hood into what configuring App Intents will do for your mobile app:
A little tech history: while we've been familiar with SiriKit since Xcode 8 with iOS 10, which allowed our apps to interact with Siri within limited domains such as messaging, VOIP apps, and payments, it required us to create somewhat cumbersome definition files and intent-handling code. It was a fair bit of work for a feature that only kind of almost worked as well as native Siri interactions (but let's not dwell on the past; the future is now).
Similarly, App Intents have been around since iOS 16.0, powering things like Spotlight Search, actions in the Shortcuts app, and Siri interactions. But with Apple Intelligence dropping soon, things are about to get a whole lot more interesting.
App Intents (as the soon-to-be backbone of Apple Intelligence) will by default streamline and enhance how users interact with Siri, Spotlight, and your app, transforming key actions into intuitive natural language voice commands and removing barriers that previously required navigating complex menus or performing multiple steps.
Here’s why.
Your users aren't opening your app to see your branding or read your message of the day; maybe that’s important to you as a digital product manager or marketer, but they want their tasks completed quickly and effortlessly. Apple Intelligence promises to streamline this kind of task completion through multimodal voice UI (i.e., Siri interaction) and machine learning. Apple's version of artificial intelligence is like an aggregator or concierge: it will understand and pull from your iPhone's personal context (your texts, contacts, images, notifications, email inbox, Calendar meetings, etc.) and can call out to ChatGPT when world knowledge is necessary.
When you use an App Intent iOS 18 will learn about the conditions in which you triggered it: what apps were you using, where were you geographically, how often do you use it, what time of day, what did you do before and after, were you driving, listening to music, etc.
The operating system will then use machine learning to build an algorithm or pattern about how you use this App Intent, improving its ability to suggest actions and surface information to the user in the future. It also can inform the system on apps that are most important to the user, and the iPhone will essentially prioritize those apps by allocating additional resources (CPU time, background time, etc.)
So…by offering these key user actions through App Intents, you provide a fast and seamless experience, which will keep users coming back for more. They will choose your app (and iOS will prioritize it) over a competitor's because you've made their experience seamless on their iPhone — just like supporting Apple Pay, Apple Sign-In, Widgets, etc.
By adopting App Intents, your brand can offer personalized and context-aware services that anticipate user needs and respond to their natural language prompts, increasing retention and driving loyalty. This isn't just about keeping pace with technological advancements — it's about leading the charge in creating an ecosystem where your app becomes an indispensable part of your users' daily routines.
Before forecasting the future of Apple Intelligence… Have you ever thought about the custom automations you can create today? With the Shortcuts app, the possibilities are seemingly endless (there’s a whole Reddit community of people experimenting with Shortcuts). You can configure automations to be invoked via Siri, an Action Button, or a Shortcut itself.
My advice is to imagine your application as a command-line app with various subcommands at your disposal. Most quick-service restaurant (QSR) apps, for instance, allow users to place orders ahead for pickup or delivery.
Here’s what App Intents looks like in action for a sample QSR app.
Let’s assume I want to automate my morning coffee order rather than having to place it every day on the way to work. Right now, I can manually create an automation that:
…and once this is all set up as an automation in the Shortcuts app, it can do this daily with minimal/zero user interaction. Pretty cool, right?
But how many regular iOS users will actually go into Shortcuts and manually program all of this Nerd Stuff in the first place, figuring out all of the necessary parameters above and organizing complex if/then statements? Not many…
Big problems with App Intents and SiriKit included low discoverability, frustrations with the extremely specific language needed for Siri, and some programmer-like chops needed to use Shortcuts. I’ve met very few folks outside of tech enthusiasts who ever use these features, and even then, lots of my programmer buddies are surprised to see what you can pull off in the Shortcuts app (or even that it exists at all!). All that potentially changes with Apple Intelligence.
So, if we think of App Intents as Lego pieces that fit together to create a pipeline of actions in Shortcuts… developers define the intents, the data shapes, and the parameters needed — and voilà, you have a pipeline that performs operations when invoked.
Now, let's go back to our earlier example of an automation that orders your coffee based on your calendar events for the day. What if we could take it a step further? What if you could wake up and say, "Hey Siri, order my coffee before I head to work this morning," and it just happens? That's the promise of Apple Intelligence.
Apple already has a rich ecosystem of App Intents from first and third-party apps. If you've experimented with OpenAI's function call APIs, you'll appreciate how impressive and straightforward they are. Apple aims to replicate this ease of use with on-device models that can parse natural language input and create those "pipelines" on the fly, asking for any additional information as needed.
So, what's the next step for your brand? Start identifying and implementing your App Intents strategy today. Consider the discrete actions your application can take and how it may integrate into Apple’s larger ecosystem of applications and on-device capabilities, all working together to achieve the user's goals. Apple's ability to leverage data from its own and third-party apps, combined with the context of what's on the user's screen, makes this a potent tool.
You may have heard that voice is the future — well, it seems the future starts now. While much of this is speculative and not present in current betas, getting ready now means your application will benefit from the platform as it exists today and be primed to evolve with Apple Intelligence and a supercharged Siri once they arrive in a few months.
The potential for App Intents is vast and largely untapped. As our WillowTree product developers continue to explore this frontier, we invite you to join us in preparing for an era where mobile app interactivity is intuitive, integrated, and indispensable.
The time to start is now — reach out today and let's make sure that when Apple Intelligence hits the betas, your application is leading the charge in providing unrivaled digital experiences.
