Every year, developers and enthusiasts of Apple’s products, firmware, and hardware await the WWDC event when the IT giant releases its latest features and functions. Developers keep an eye on this event to know the latest updates and gain access to these updates.
After the last WWDC event, iOS developers now have full access to iOS 16 and XCode 14. As these are available within the development environment, developers, including the ones at DevIT (an iOS App development company), can now dive into the features and functions of iOS 16.
At its core, the basic purpose of AppIntent is to expose capabilities or features in iOS. On the other end, the exposed details will be captured by the Shortcut App and Siri.
Developers can use this AppIntent system to extract the code required to perform a certain action and define the data required through the system. In this excerpt, we will talk about AppIntent in some detail and understand its specifics.
Understanding App Intents Framework
There are two aspects to understand here, System Services and content or functionality. App Intents acts as a bridge between the two, allowing developers to make the content and functionality available to systems services.
These include Siri and the Shortcuts App. At present, the App Intents functionality is available for the following capabilities and services;
Menu Bar
Share Extensions
Terminal
AppleScript
Home Screen
Suggestions
Lock Screen
Shortcuts Widgets
Quick Actions
Voice (Siri)
Apple Watch
HomePod
Automation
Shortcuts App
Keyboard
Spotlight
Among the uses of App Intents, we can include supplying metadata, UI information, activation phrases, and other actions that are required to initiate an application’s actions.
In simple words, for something like fetching data, we can use App Intents to find the time for the next meeting or ask about an order you have placed.
Moreover, you can also use this data functionality to add information without opening the application. So, when you want to add a new meeting to the calendar, App Intents can help you do the same without ever opening the calendar app.
To deliver this sort of functionality, App Intents has to execute the action in three places;
Metadata:
This is the application, service, or functionality information that is displayed in the Shortcuts App. For example, the name Calendar is metadata.
Parameters:
This includes the input intent required from the user’s end and is supplied by one of three ways; interactions, Siri, and keyboard. To understand a parameter better let’s find go through an example.
Take, for instance, your meditation application that has different session types that you want to use to access a specific type of parameter. For this purpose, we can use App Intents to give the application a certain functionality, by using parameters.
Until this point, we have helped the meditation application establish a connection between AppIntents and the meditation application.
To further the implementation, we have to allow the AppIntents entities to look for the specific function based on the identifier.
Moving forward, we can add the user to select a specific meditation session from the application.
Perform Method:
This includes the system required for running the main function of the intent.
According to the information we have gathered to date, using App Intents is easy. It requires integrating a few lines of code. In case you want your mobile app development company to add more complex features, it can be done as well.
The Importance of App Intents in iOS 16 and its Users
Improving user experience is one of the major motives for releasing the App Intents framework. As it enables developers to add additional functionality, automate the actions, and even streamline some functionalities for the users, they can benefit from auto-completion of actions with touch and voice.
App Intents comes after Siri Intents, which was released with iOS 10. In Siri Intents, the users could expose the application’s functionality to Siri domains, including messaging, workouts, and payments.