The productivity features people use most on iPhone often happen outside your app: a widget on the Home Screen, a button in Control Center, a phrase to Siri, a Spotlight result, a Live Activity on the Lock Screen. On iOS, all of these are built on one foundation, the App Intents framework, which describes your app's actions and data to the system. Start by defining your two or three most frequent tasks as app intents, expose them as App Shortcuts, then add the one widget or control that saves people the most taps.
Key takeaways
- App Intents (iOS 16 and later) is how your app's actions and data become available to Siri, Spotlight, the Shortcuts app, the Action button, widgets, controls, Live Activities and, in Apple's words, become "discoverable by Apple Intelligence."
- App Shortcuts are available as soon as someone installs your app; nobody has to set them up.
- WidgetKit powers widgets, Live Activities and controls. Buttons and toggles in widgets run app intents (iOS 17 and later); controls for Control Center, the Lock Screen and the Action button arrive with iOS 18.
- Live Activities (iOS 16.1 and later) suit tasks people follow for minutes or hours, such as a delivery, a booking or a timer.
- Do the work once: the same intent can back a Siri phrase, a widget button, a control and a Spotlight action.
Why build features that work outside your app?
Because that is where the time savings are. When this article was first published in 2017, it listed productivity apps people liked for things such as natural-language event entry, cross-app automation and quick capture. Since then Apple has moved much of that into the operating system: people now start tasks from the Lock Screen, the Action button, Siri or Spotlight and expect your app to answer there. An app that can only be used by opening it, finding a screen and tapping through it loses to one that does the common task in one step.
Ask one question of every feature: what does someone do with this app ten times a week? Those tasks are your candidates. Our article on user research for mobile apps describes how to find them with a handful of interviews and analytics.
What are App Intents and why start there?
An app intent is a single action your app performs, written in Swift, that the system can run. Apple's documentation describes the framework as the way to "make content and actions discoverable by Apple Intelligence and support system experiences like Siri, Spotlight, Shortcuts, and widgets." It lists the places that can use your intents: Siri, Spotlight, the Shortcuts app, Apple Pencil and the iPhone Action button, WidgetKit, controls and ActivityKit, and custom Focus modes.
Two building blocks matter:
- App intents are the actions, for example "log expense", "start timer", "add task".
- App entities describe your key data types, such as a project, a client file or a saved route, so the system can refer to them. Apple warns that an app entity has a total size limit of 10 MB, so keep them lean.
Starting here means every later feature (widget, control, Siri) reuses the same code rather than each needing its own.
What do App Shortcuts add?
App Shortcuts wrap an intent with a title, an icon and spoken phrases, and can pre-fill parameters so the action runs with no questions. Apple's example is a hiking app: the intent "start a hike" needs a trail, but a shortcut can start a hike on the person's favourite trail in one step.
Apple says App Shortcuts "are available as soon as someone installs your app, and you don't have to register them yourself." They appear in the Shortcuts app and Spotlight and can be run through Siri. Inside your app, Apple provides tip views that show people the phrase for a shortcut, which helps with discovery. One privacy note for your policy: Apple says it may extract anonymised App Shortcuts data, such as phrases and intent titles, to train the models that improve the experience.
Which widgets, controls and Live Activities make sense?
Pick by how long the information matters and whether people need to act on it:
| Feature | Where it appears | Best for | Since |
|---|---|---|---|
| Widget | Home Screen, Today View, Lock Screen; iPhone widgets can also show on a Mac and in CarPlay | Glanceable status: today's tasks, a balance, next appointment | iOS 14 (WidgetKit) |
| Interactive widget | Same places, with buttons and toggles | One-tap actions, such as ticking off a task, without opening the app | iOS 17 (buttons that run intents) |
| Control | Control Center, Lock Screen, Action button | A single action or on/off state: start recording, toggle a device | iOS 18 |
| Live Activity | Lock Screen, Dynamic Island, Home Screen; also Apple Watch Smart Stack, Mac menu bar and CarPlay | Something that changes over minutes or hours: an order, a trip, a match | iOS 16.1 (ActivityKit) |
Three practical points from Apple's documentation:
- Widgets update on a timeline, a schedule of data you give WidgetKit, which then refreshes them in an energy-efficient way. They can also be refreshed by push notifications. Do not expect a widget to behave like a live screen.
- Live Activities update differently, through ActivityKit and ActivityKit push notifications from your server, so plan the server side before you design one.
- On a locked device, buttons and toggles in widgets are inactive until the person authenticates, so do not put an action there that is useless after a delay.
Apple's own advice is to start small: a non-configurable small widget, then more sizes and configuration. Our app design team designs these surfaces with the main app, because each size needs its own layout.
How do Siri, Spotlight and Apple Intelligence use your actions?
Through the same intents and entities. Since iOS 18, entities that adopt Apple's IndexedEntity protocol can be added to Spotlight, which Apple says also makes them "discoverable by Apple Intelligence." Since iOS 18, app intents can also conform to system-defined schemas for common domains such as photos, mail or audio, which give Apple Intelligence a shared structure to work with; Xcode can generate a starting intent when you type a domain name followed by an underscore.
Apple describes Siri AI as in beta in iOS 27, requiring an Apple Intelligence-enabled device. That means two things for planning. Build your intents well now, because they are what Siri and Apple Intelligence call into. But do not make a core task depend on Siri understanding a request, because many supported iPhones do not have Apple Intelligence and the feature is still in beta. If you want AI features inside your app as well, our article on LLM features and on-device models in mobile apps covers the options.
Where should you start?
A sequence that works for most business apps:
- List the five most frequent tasks from analytics or support tickets.
- Write the top two or three as app intents, with entities for the data they act on.
- Expose them as App Shortcuts with clear phrases, and show a tip in the app.
- Add one widget (small first) showing the information people check most.
- Add a control or Live Activity only if a task is a single toggle, or follows something over time.
- Index key entities in Spotlight if people search for records by name.
Check the iOS versions you support first: controls and Spotlight entity indexing need iOS 18, interactive widgets iOS 17. Our guide to which iPhones and iOS versions to support covers that decision, and our iOS development page describes how we build native iPhone apps.
How do you test these features?
Test them where people use them, not only in the app. Run each shortcut by voice and from Spotlight, add each widget size to the Home Screen and Lock Screen, try widget buttons on a locked phone, put the control on the Action button, and leave a Live Activity running long enough to see updates arrive. Check what happens when the person is signed out, offline, or has removed the data the widget refers to.
FAQ
What is the difference between an app intent and an App Shortcut?
An app intent is the action itself. An App Shortcut packages an intent with a title, icon, spoken phrases and optional preset values so it runs in one step from Siri, Spotlight or the Shortcuts app.
Do users have to set up App Shortcuts?
No. Apple says App Shortcuts are available as soon as someone installs your app. Users can still build their own shortcuts from your intents in the Shortcuts app.
Which iOS version do interactive widgets need?
Buttons that run app intents, which make widgets interactive, are available from iOS 17. Controls in Control Center need iOS 18.
Should a business app have a Live Activity?
Only if it tracks something that changes over minutes or hours, such as an order, a booking or a job in progress. Live Activities need server-side updates, so plan that work.
Will my app work with the new Siri?
Siri and Apple Intelligence use your app intents and entities, so defining them well is the preparation. Apple lists Siri AI as in beta in iOS 27 and only on Apple Intelligence devices, so keep every core task usable without it.
Sources (13 links)
- Apple Developer Documentation, "App Intents": https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appintents
- Apple Developer Documentation, "App Shortcuts": https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appintents/app-shortcuts
- Apple Developer Documentation, "AppEntity" (10 MB limit): https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appintents/appentity
- Apple Developer Documentation, "Creating your first app intent" (system-defined schemas): https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appintents/creating-your-first-app-intent
- Apple Developer Documentation, "AppIntent(schema:)": https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appintents/appintent(schema:)
- Apple Developer Documentation, "IndexedEntity": https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appintents/indexedentity
- Apple Developer Documentation, "WidgetKit": https://developer.apple.com/documentation/widgetkit
- Apple Developer Documentation, "Developing a WidgetKit strategy": https://developer.apple.com/documentation/widgetkit/developing-a-widgetkit-strategy
- Apple Developer Documentation, "Adding interactivity to widgets and Live Activities": https://developer.apple.com/documentation/widgetkit/adding-interactivity-to-widgets-and-live-activities
- Apple Developer Documentation, "Button init(intent:label:)": https://developer.apple.com/documentation/swiftui/button/init(intent:label:)
- Apple Developer Documentation, "ControlWidget": https://developer.apple.com/documentation/swiftui/controlwidget
- Apple Developer Documentation, "ActivityKit": https://developer.apple.com/documentation/activitykit
- Apple, "iOS 27" (Siri AI beta and Apple Intelligence footnote): https://www.apple.com/ios/
