Getting an iPhone to Announce an Event: A Partiful-like Application for Event Invitations with Artificial Intelligence on the App Store
It is an easy-to- use app that helps you invite friends to certain things rather than having to memorize all the details for a text message. The plus button on the Apple Invites app can be used to create an event, where you can add a name, date, and location. If you have a phone with Apple Intelligence support, you can whip up an Artificial Intelligence-generated picture using Apple’s Image Playground feature.
The app appears to be very similar to Partiful, a popular event invitation service that was founded in 2020 and has blown up over the past few years. Both services offer a simple, mobile-friendly interface for responding to invites and getting event details. Partiful doesn’t charge a fee, and it’s much more oriented toward Gen Z.
Update, February 4th: This story has been updated to cover Apple Invite’s official launch; it initially covered the app leaking shortly before the announcement.
The event info is displayed with a variety ofWidgets, including a weather forecast and an Apple Maps box, that you can use 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.
It is unsurprising that the experience has some issues for people who are not in the Apple ecosystem. 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. If you add a photo album to your Apple account, they need an Apple Music subscription to hear it, otherwise they will only get a preview of it.
If you keep the key details of the event private, they will still see it and it will be obvious that they are not getting the whole experience. Partiful is an event invites app, which has largely the same experience as the app’s developers suggested, but remains a platform-agnostic product.
