While the new Apple Invites app and service sounds easy to use, it joins together so many Apple Services that it takes several steps — and can confuse your invitees. Here’s how to use it.
Apple Invites has been launched, though at time of writing it’s still not rolled out worldwide. If an App Store search does not turn it up for you, try this direct link.
The app is so new that there is no Apple support documentation for it, which means there are certain points that are not yet clear. Specifically, it’s not sure what Android users will or will not see when they have accepted an invitation from Apple Invites.
Apple Invites is a free iPhone app, but as the organizer of an event, you have to have a paid iCloud+ subscription in order to use it. Your invitees do not, and they do not have to have an Apple Account, so Android users should be able to sign up to your event.
Whether your invitees are iPhone or Android though, what they see can be confusing. Ultimately, you are sending them a link, via Messages or email, and they get that plus a poster image — if you have chosen one.
You really must include some explanatory text, not least because of what happens next. When they tap on the link or the poster in Messages, they are taken to icloud.com in Safari and — if they are iPhone users — they are prompted to sign in.
There is a small X to close that sign in pane, but they’ll have to look for it. It would be much better if Apple presented a bespoke sign-in making it clear that this is optional.
As well as using the standard iCloud sign-in form, Apple is also using the standard prompt for getting an app. So at the top of the screen you see an app you might not want, and in the middle you see a sign-in screen that you may be suspicious of.
Apple could also just point out that if you scroll down the webpage, you get the option to join the party with an email address instead of using the app. But then it should know the email address the invitation was sent to, so it’s not clear why it doesn’t just populate that email field so that you can simply tap yes or no.
Setting up is easy for the organizer
That all said, creating an event itself, prior to sending out the invitation, is straightforward — if at times slow. To create your first-ever event:
- Open Apple Invites
- Tap Create Event
- Optionally pick a photo of yours, choose from suggested backgrounds, or skip Add Background
- Type in the event title
- Enter the date and time
- Enter the location
- Write a description of up to 1,000 characters
- Optionally create a shared photo album for the event
- Optionally create a shared Apple Music playlist
- Tap Preview at top right to see how the invitation will look to your recipients
- Tap Next
- Choose how to invite people, and whether to accept them all or approve each one
There’s good and bad in these steps. The best is perhaps the date and location picking, because those are well done.
Location is via an Apple Maps style search field. And with date, you get options to include an end time as well as a start.
Creating a shared photo album is straightforward too, but the shared Apple Music one requires an extra step — and can prove to be slow.
L-R starting to set up a new event
You can’t share a playlist unless you have an Apple Music Profile. You may think you have one, since you’re an Apple Music subscriber but no, this is different.
An Apple Music Profile tells people that you’re up for sharing some or all of your playlists, and that for some unfathomable reason you’re interested in theirs. To set up this profile:
- Open Apple Music on iPhone
- Tap your icon (possibly just your initials) at top right on the Apple Music Home screen
- Choose Set up Profile
- Fill out a username
- Tap Continue to Find Contacts
- Click Follow if you want to follow a friend’s playlists, then Next
- Choose whether you can be followed by Everyone or only People You Approve and tap Next
- Pick which, if any, of your playlists you’re happy to share and tap Done
If you’re not already regretting that you wanted a shared playlist for your event, you may do now. Because in AppleInsider testing, Apple Music hung at this point and had to be force quit.
Ignoring that and going back to Apple Invites, you are next prompted to decide “How do you want to share contacts?” — and this is again not clear.
The reasoning is that people you invite to an event may need to contact each other, but Apple will never give out any private details. You have to make that decision, you have to decide what you want to do — and it appears that you cannot choose that you don’t want to share anything.
It appears that you have to choose between allowing your invitees to see selected contacts that you will specify in a next step, or all of your contacts. In practice, Apple does only allow these two options at this point, but after you’ve decided on just Select Contacts, you can skip in fact adding any.
Optionally and slowly adding Apple Music before sending an invitation
You don’t appear to be able to say that you will only share, say, email addresses, and keep phone numbers or photos private.
Finally sending the invitation
After you’ve gone through fathoming out how happy you are to share people’s contact details, you finally get a Choose a Guest option. Here there are two sorts of guests, either someone you allowed in the contact-sharing stage, or New Guest.
If you now tap on the name of the contact you previously allowed, you’re now given the ability to send them a unique invitation link. You can send it via Messages, Mail, or copy the link to send around any other way you like.
Depending on your choice, you now have to pick which phone number to text, or which email address to send to if the recipient has more than one.
The Message or email is shown to you as solely a link, specifically an iCloud link. You can enter some explanatory text, and you should.
After the invitation is sent
Once you’ve done all of this and sent the invitation, and once the recipient has figured out that you haven’t sent them a spam link, they can elect to join your little group. They can tap a Going, Not Going, or Maybe button, and be reminded of how Facebook does it the same way.
When they have made their choice, you are notified as the event organizer.
This is where the real benefit of Apple Invites will come. You could always have sent out invitations by Messages yourself, but managing the replies would have been hard.
Apple Invites lets you see at a glance who has said they’re coming. They may still not turn up, you know what people are like, but at least you will have an idea of numbers.
And any of those people who are coming will, at least if they are iPhone users with the Apple Invites app, be able to contribute photos and music to the party.
A mish-mash of services
So far in setting up a first event, Apple Invites has leveraged Apple Maps, Apple Music, Photos, Contacts, and Messages and/or Mail. Much of this has required entering or confirming permissions, turning a simple procedure into a chore.
But then there is one more Apple service that can optionally be used — and it’s the one solitary service you would think would be automatic.
Calendar.
You go through this whole process and nothing at all ends up in your Calendar, or at least not automatically. You’re not even prompted to add the event to your Calendar as you’re making or editing it.
Instead, you have to choose to go find and tap the Calendar icon at top right of the invitation to create an event.
And of course the first thing it does is ask permission for Apple Invites to access the calendar.
All of this does take far less time to do than to describe, and overall it is a clever way of benefitting from there being so many Apple services. But each step does feel like a barrier, when you’re setting up your first event.
The second and subsequent events get to skip certain steps. For some reason, there isn’t the same confusing going through of contacts to share, for instance.
Instead, you get the option to create a general link you send to anyone, or you can choose a specific guest.
Except by default, that specific guest can only be one you allowed contact details to be shared for. Tap on Choose a Guest and you are offered their name or names, and a Settings button for you to add more.
So Apple Invites definitely looks good, it does definitely offer a good service in how it manages RSVPs. But there are enough rough edges that maybe it should have gone through in-house user testing as was expected.
