Apple launches brand-new Invites app infused with AI

Apple has launched a new in-house iPhone app designed to help users organize social gatherings. It’s called Apple Invites, and it’s out now.

As the name suggests, the first duty of the app is to create custom event invitations. You can use one of your own images as the main illustration, or choose one from a curated library themed around various occasions. You can also, inevitably, get Apple Intelligence involved, using Image Playground to generate “original” images tailored to the event and the people in attendance or Apple Intelligence’s writing tools to craft the perfect text.

The invites feature directions and a weather forecast (thanks to integration with Apple Maps and Weather) and allow invitees to RSVP and view attendees based on RSVPs already submitted. Apple says you need to be an iCloud+ subscriber to create invitations using the app, but anyone, even those without an Apple device or account, can RSVP to one.

However, the app has a larger scope than just creating and sending out the invitation. Guests can also upload photos and videos of the event to a Shared Album contained within the invite, and (if they subscribe to Apple Music) contribute to collaborative playlists. It isn’t clear if there will be any ability to upload playlists from Spotify or other services in the future but for now, at least the app directs you to Apple Music only.

Given that it’s a software-only release with no hardware supply chain to leak out details ahead of the launch, Apple may have hoped that Invites would come as a surprise. But details were spotted in beta code in January and last Sunday Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman said the app could arrive as early as this week. The only thing he seems to have got wrong is that he persistently and pointedly referred to it as a service, not the app it has turned out to be (though it’s linked to iCloud+).

Good news for Gurman, then, and seemingly good news for Apple and its customers. But as is often the case with a new Apple app, there are losers too, because Invites appears to fill a niche previously occupied by third-party app developers. Apple is notorious for “Sherlocking” its software partners in this way, bringing features they previously offered as independent apps within its own ecosystem and thereby putting them out of a job. Developers of apps such as Evite will have received the news of this launch with dismay.

Apple Invites is available right now (for the iPhone only; there’s no sign of an iPad version) on the App Store. App Store search, never the most efficient, didn’t seem to have gotten the memo when I started writing this article, but after updating to iOS 18.3 and waiting half an hour I’m finding that it’s showing up fine. I’m not sure if the update or the wait made the crucial difference.