iOS 14: App Clips

A quick overview

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If let swift = Programming!

5 min readJul 24, 2020

At the WWDC20 Apple has announced a new feature for iOS14 called “App Clips”, which is a like a small part of your app that’s discoverable at the moment it’s needed, is lightweight and fast to use without needing to download an entire app.

Overview

App Clips are a separate download and are mutually exclusive on-device with the main App (ship bundled with the main app on the App Store). They have to be less than 10 MB in size. App clips can use both UIKit or SwiftUI. A single App can have multiples App clips.

When a user installs an App Clip’s corresponding app, the full app replaces the app clip. From this moment on, every invocation launches the full app instead of the app clip, and the user gets the functionality of the app clip within the full app. If the user doesn’t install the full app, the system automatically removes the app clip after a period of inactivity.

App clips can have a temporary storage that can be removed in any moment by the system (the storage is more similar to a cache). The intent of the storage is more to save some informations that could them be passed to the main app when user decide to install it.

How discover App clips

The image below present all different ways on how an App Clips can be invoked:

App clips Design

When planning your App clips remember that App clips are designed for speed. Interaction with App clips need to be quick and focused. App Clips should focus on essential tasks and limit features to what is needed for the specific task. For the vast or complex features, reserve them for your main app.

Hierarchies like this in the image are good in Apps because they help people navigate complex flow but when planning App Clips however this kind of flow should be radically re-thinked.

Start, by only including the pieces of your app that play to the strengths of App Clips.

App clips will be used in specific moments and context and in those situations features like directory listings or profile screens for example may no longer make sense.

Unlike applications, app clips should omit all top-level navigation elements like tab bars. Instead, you should use separate URLs for any distinct experiences.

Do not include splash screens or make users wait for download before they can start a task. Wait to ask people to sign up until after they have finished the task. Creating an account is a complex task, and takes time so do only if necessary and in case it’s needed use technologies as Sign In with Apple to speed up the process.

In a few words… keep it simple, fast and focused.

The is also another important concept related to App clips: App Clip Experience.

The App Clip Experience Card form the basis for how people will discover and launch App Clips, they are like a new entry points into your app. Each App Clip Experience open the corresponding App clips but if the main App is installed then the expercience will open directly the App.

App Clip Experience use a speficic URL and the process is similar to the Universal Links for the main App; the key different is that App Clip URLs are not defined by your Apple app site associations file, but are registered using App Store Connect.

You can setup App Clip Cards on App Store Connect. After you’ve delivered a build containing both your app and your App Clip to App Store Connect, the App Clips will be visible on App Store Connect with a new App Clip Configuration section. This is where you can start setting up the default and advanced App Clip experiences. For the same App Clip, you can set up multiple advanced App Clip experiences, each with a different URL

Conclusions

Consider creating an app clip if that could provides an in-the-moment experience that helps people perform a task over a finite amount of time. Focus only on essential features and ensure that people can use your app clip immediately with a minimum loading time. Is very recomamnded to use Apple Pay and Sign with Apple for a very fast process. Keep in mind that probably not every business will need an App Clip. App clips should provide real value and shouldn’t be used solely for marketing purposes.

There is also a specific scenario where App Clips could make a lot of sense and this is when an existing app aggregates many businesses into a customer-facing app and lets users discover them from a catalog. Think for example about a franchising group that has a main App for general informations where you can then navigate to specific shop functions. In this case they could have many App Clips for each specific shop with specific features. This could take also advantage of the location to use an NFC Tag or to have a place card in Apple Maps.

Apple clips are at an early stage and would be interesting to see how many companies will make use of them and in what kind of scenarious.

Thanks for your time reading this article.

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