For a long time, many iOS developers treated App Intents as a nice extra: useful for Shortcuts, good for power users, but not essential to the core app.
That is changing. App Intents are becoming the public vocabulary of an app. They describe what your app can do, what entities it manages, and which actions the system can safely expose through Siri, Shortcuts, Spotlight, widgets, controls, and Apple Intelligence.
In other words, App Intents are no longer just about automation. They are becoming a way for the operating system to understand your app.
Apple describes App Intents as a framework for integrating app actions and content with system experiences. Those experiences now include Siri, Shortcuts, Spotlight, widgets, controls, the Action button, Apple Watch, and Apple Intelligence.
That matters because users increasingly start tasks outside the app icon. They search, speak, automate, tap a widget, press a control, or ask the system to do something. App Intents give your app a structured way to participate in those flows.
At the simplest level, an intent is a small action:
import AppIntents
struct StartFocusSessionIntent: AppIntent {
static var title: LocalizedStringResource = "Start Focus Session"
static var description = IntentDescription("Start a focus timer in the app.")
@Parameter(title: "Minutes")
var minutes: Int
func perform() async throws -> some IntentResult {
// Start the timer or hand off to your app's model layer.
return .result()
}
}The important part is not the syntax. The important part is that your app is declaring a capability in a form the system can index, display, suggest, and invoke.
WWDC 2024 made the direction clear. In Design App Intents for system experiences, Apple positioned App Intents as a bridge between apps and system features like Siri, Apple Intelligence, Spotlight, controls, widgets, and the Action button.
WWDC 2025 pushed this further. Develop for Shortcuts and Spotlight with App Intents shows how App Intents can make app actions available in Shortcuts and Spotlight. Explore new advances in App Intents covers newer capabilities such as interactive snippets, entity view annotations, Visual Intelligence integration, and deferred properties. Design interactive snippets focuses on making intent results more interactive inside Siri, Spotlight, and Shortcuts.
That is a strong signal: App Intents are moving from “automation feature” to “system integration layer.”
There is also a broader AI reason. When users ask an assistant to do something useful, the assistant needs more than text generation. It needs safe, typed actions. App Intents provide those actions in a way Apple can mediate through permissions, parameters, app entities, and system UI.
TechCrunch covered this direction during WWDC 2024 in Apple brings its GenAI “Apple Intelligence” to developers, noting that App Intents were part of Apple’s developer story for Siri and Apple Intelligence. More recently, developer posts like App Intents Are Apple’s New API to Your App argue that the framework is becoming the route through which the system understands what an app can do.
The App Store is still important, but discovery no longer happens only there. A user might find an app action through:
If your app has useful actions but no App Intents, the system has fewer ways to surface those actions at the right time.
This is especially important for apps that are mostly about workflows: habit trackers, finance tools, writing apps, task managers, health apps, smart home apps, journaling apps, workout apps, and productivity utilities. These apps often have small repeatable actions that fit App Intents well.
Examples:
These are not full app sessions. They are user intentions. That is exactly the level where App Intents fit.
It is easy to think App Intents are only for people who build complex Shortcuts. That view is too narrow now.
Apple’s Shortcuts developer page explains App Shortcuts as actions available as soon as an app is installed. But the same intent definitions can also support other system surfaces. That reuse is the real value.
One well-designed intent can show up in several places:
That makes App Intents a relatively high-leverage feature. You are not just building one integration. You are creating a structured action that Apple can reuse across the system.
The hard part is not writing the Swift code. The hard part is choosing the right actions.
Good App Intents should be:
The best candidates are actions users already repeat manually. If someone opens your app every day to tap the same button, that button might be an App Intent.
If your app has no App Intents yet, do not start by modeling the entire app. Start with a small set of obvious actions.
For most apps, a practical first pass is:
Then improve the supporting model:
Apple has confirmed WWDC26 runs June 8-12, 2026, and the company has already said the event will include AI advancements. For App Intents, the most important questions are practical:
Those questions matter more than a polished Siri demo. The real developer value is whether Apple gives apps more reliable ways to expose actions to the system.
Big apps can rely on brand, habit, and notifications. Indie apps often need every useful discovery surface they can get.
App Intents can help a small app feel more native and more present across the system. A good intent can put your app into Siri, Spotlight, Shortcuts, widgets, and controls without requiring the user to remember where the feature lives.
That does not mean every feature needs an intent. It means the most repeated, useful, and automatable parts of your app should be available outside the app shell.
If Apple Intelligence becomes a bigger part of iOS, apps with well-designed App Intents may have an advantage. They will already have a typed map of what they can do.