Apple’s WWDC 2024 put a big emphasis on App Intents. App Intents are a way to expose pieces of your app’s functionality to the system, which can then be used by system apps like Shortcuts and Siri to combine these functionalities and create a whole new experience that can accomplish tasks across multiple apps. This is as great as it sounds and very useful.
But the bigger question is: does it make sense for app developers to expose parts of their apps? It makes sense for the consumer and the platform because it makes the consumer’s life easier, but the app developers are losing engagement and interactions.
If the consumer never opens your app, you will not be able to upsell new features or showcase new functionality.
We can also see this pattern in the AI revolution of search engines. Now, instead of finding the best website, search engines want to summarise and provide the answer to you, which results in less traffic for each website they summarise.
As a developer, I love the idea of exposing every bit of my app so we can have cross-app functionality, and the consumer will be able to orchestrate things we can’t even imagine. But does it make sense for all the app developers out there who want people to use their apps more?
I don’t know how all of this is going to unravel, but one thing I know is that these are interesting times for the whole developer community. With things like App Intents, we are closer than ever to the core of the platform we are developing, where the customer can’t differentiate who is accomplishing the work between a third-party app or system-level software.