Interesting change in guidance for App Intents this year, probably in preparation for upcoming Apple Intelligence features. Direct quote from ‘Design App Intents for system experiences’:
“Previously, app intents were meant to be the most habitual tasks in your app that could be useful outside of your app. This meant an app was expected to only have a few app intents. In iOS 18, we’re changing this guidance to go beyond common functionality. Now, anything your app does should be an app intent.”
@mactanaka @rosemary I don’t understand app design, but is this something that all apps do?
Cross-platform apps (looking at you, Goodnotes and Garmin) currently don’t take much advantage of shortcuts as they seem to be built for a common set of features. I really hope that these are two separate, unrelated things
@jdechko Not every app supports it, but Apple now uses this technology in so many places throughout the OS that I think it will slowly become more popular.
Cross-platform apps often don't support these OS-specific features because they aim to share the same code across different platforms, which (usually, but not always) means supporting the lowest common denominator in terms of features.
@mactanaka Yeah, that’s been my experience as well.
I’ll keep doing my semi-annual notes app review just to see if anything better pops up.
Marcos Tanaka
Jonathan Dechko