App Intents: How Apple lets Siri and Spotlight use what your apps can do

App Intents is an Apple framework that lets an app describe its actions and its content in a form the operating system can read. Once an app does that, Siri, Spotlight and the Shortcuts app can run those actions or find that content without the user opening the app first.

It matters more now because Apple has opened a Siri AI developer preview that routes through it, as we reported.

One sentence to an app, no taps

Imagine a reading app. You say, “Open Currently Reading in the library app.” Your phone opens the right shelf. You never found the icon or tapped a menu.

That works because the app told the system two things in advance: it can open a shelf, and it has a thing called a shelf. The framework is the vocabulary for saying so. Apple’s own WWDC 2022 session uses a book-library app as its running example, including adding a book by voice on a HomePod.

Intents, entities and shortcuts: The three building blocks

Apple’s WWDC 2022 session “Dive into App Intents” names three pieces.

Intents are actions. Apple defines an intent as “a single, isolated unit of functionality that your app exposes to the system.” It has a title, optional inputs called parameters, and a perform method that does the work. An intent can run when asked, such as through Siri, or automatically, such as in a Shortcuts automation.

Entities are things. Apple describes an entity as a concept the app exposes, and says to use one instead of a fixed list of choices when the values are dynamic or user-made, like a note, a photo or an album. An entity carries an identifier and a display name. A query, written as an EntityQuery, lets the system look entities up inside the app.

App Shortcuts wrap intents so they work immediately. Per the same session, they let people use an app’s features by voice through Siri without any setup. The developer declares spoken phrases in an AppShortcutsProvider.

An intent such as “add a book” can take an entity such as a specific shelf as input. The system can then chain the pieces: find a shelf, then act on it.

Where the framework came from

Apple introduced App Intents at WWDC 2022 as a Swift-native framework. It sits beside the older SiriKit Intents, which covered fixed domains such as messaging and payments. Apple’s guidance at the time was to upgrade custom intents built for Siri and Shortcuts to App Intents, while SiriKit stayed supported.

The framework kept growing. In its WWDC 2024 session, Apple said App Intents powers Shortcuts, Spotlight, widgets, the Action button and Apple Pencil squeeze, and is core to Apple Intelligence and Controls. That session also added IndexedEntity, which lets an app place its entities into the Spotlight search index so they can be found and then acted on.

Why an AI assistant needs this layer

A language model can understand a request like “where is my order?” It still needs a safe, defined way to ask an app to do something. App Intents supplies that: a menu of actions with named inputs, which the app controls.

This resembles tool calling in other AI systems, where a model is given a list of functions it may invoke. The difference is that Apple’s list lives in the operating system, and every app contributes to the same one. An app that describes its actions poorly is harder for the assistant to use.

That is the basis of the current preview. According to Apple’s announcement as covered in our report, the 27.3 betas let any app feed its content and actions into Siri AI through App Intents. Apple names two additions. Skills let developers teach Siri AI to chain several actions into one experience. The Spotlight semantic index can now surface any entity, not only those that fit an existing schema. Apple says users will be able to ask in their own words and Siri AI can then run actions such as checking a delivery, booking a reservation or placing an order.

Limits and open questions

The framework only exposes what a developer writes. If an app has no intents, the assistant cannot act inside it. Developers must decide which actions are safe to run from a voice request and what the app should confirm first.

Several things are still unclear for the Siri AI preview. Per Apple, customers get the features in a few months, and App Store submission for apps using them opens in the spring. Terms and usage policies for Siri AI experiences are still to come, and Apple says expanded access will cost money later without saying how much. Apple also says Siri AI is currently unavailable in the EU on iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch. Apple’s claims about how well the system handles natural-language requests have not been independently tested.

What to watch

• Whether the usage policies limit what third-party apps can do through Siri AI.
• How well the system picks the right app when several expose similar actions.
• Which apps ship intents when App Store submission opens in the spring.
• Whether Apple publishes the daily usage limits and the future pricing.

For developers, the practical step is the same as in 2022: describe actions and data clearly, because that description is what the system sees.