Apple launched a new app today, called Apple Invites, which lets you create, share, and manage invitations for events. With it, you can generate a quick digital invitation that, when shared with your friends, lets them gather all the info about the event, RSVP, and add it to their calendar. That includes your Android friends, who can access invites using a web-based version of the app on the iCloud site.
It’s a mostly straightforward, easy-to-use app that offers a better way to invite friends to things than trying to cram all the details into a text message or make sure everyone checks their Facebook events. Creating an event using the plus button at the top of the Apple Invites app will let you type in a name and add time, date, and location details. You can also add an Apple-made background, pick a photo from your library, or, if you have a phone with Apple Intelligence support, whip up an AI-generated one using Apple’s Image Playground feature.
You can invite people by picking from your contacts, manually entering phone numbers or email addresses, or copying a link to your event and sending it from outside the app. The app also lets you choose whether each person is allowed to invite others, and you can send notes to invitees after the event is created.
The event’s info is shown with widgets, including one showing the weather forecast for that day and an Apple Maps box that you can tap to get directions. You can also create a photo album for people to peruse or add a music playlist, too, using Apple Music. All of that works mostly seamlessly on an iPhone, apart from some buggy behavior I encountered, like invitations that wouldn’t load and trouble getting the photo album in an invite to actually populate with pictures after I picked them.
The experience has some hiccups for those not fully in the Apple ecosystem, which isn’t surprising. For starters, where an iPhone user can go straight to the invitation using your link (assuming they’re already signed into iCloud), Android users have to enter their email address and then a verification code to get in. They’ll also need to sign up for an Apple account to look at a photo album if you add one, and Android user or not, your friends need an Apple Music subscription to hear your playlist (otherwise, they’ll only get a preview of it).
None of that will keep Android users from seeing key details about your event or RSVPing to it, but it’ll be obvious that they aren’t getting the whole experience. Event invite app Partiful offers largely the same experience — maybe a little too samey, as the app’s developers insinuated today — while remaining a “platform-agnostic product,” Partiful cofounder and CEO Shreya Murthy said in a statement emailed to The Verge.
Partiful has become a buzzy option for managing event invites over the past few years, adding a bunch of fun touches like the ability to RSVP to invites with GIFs and emoji. It’s also entirely free to use, which is a big distinction from Apple Invites. Apple’s app requires an iCloud Plus subscription in order to create events. That makes it a nice, safe option for people who are already subscribers, but it’s hard to imagine Apple Invites being the feature anyone signs up for.
Copycat accusations and bugs aside, Apple Invites seems like a promising start, particularly if you’re in the Apple ecosystem and want to keep friends in the loop without using Facebook events, third-party apps, texts, or emails. But it’s also an app with a social purpose that Apple claims in its announcement “brings people together for life’s special moments.” That sounds pleasant but feels less so once you get the mediocre Android version of the experience.
Update, February 4th: Added more detail on Partiful and the iCloud Plus requirement.
