Apple Invites vs. Partiful: An iPhone-based Event Planning App with Automatically Enabled iCloud Subscription
Apple has just announced Apple invites, an event planning app for the iPhones that will allow iCloud subscribers to create and share invitations to parties and other events. Recipients can RSVP regardless of whether they have an iCloud subscription or an Apple device. It is also available on the internet.
The app appears to be very similar to Partiful, a popular event invitation service that was founded in 2020 and has blown up over the past few years. Both services offer a simple, mobile-friendly interface for responding to invites and getting event details. Partiful doesn’t charge a fee, and it’s much more oriented toward Gen Z.
February 4th is an update. The app leaking shortly before the announcement was covered in the original story, but it has now been updated to cover Apple Invites official launch.
The weather forecast for the day and an Apple Maps box are included in the event info, which is shown in a way you can find it. You can also create a photo album for people to peruse or add a music playlist, too, using Apple Music. All of that works mostly seamlessly on an iPhone, apart from some buggy behavior I encountered, like invitations that wouldn’t load and trouble getting the photo album in an invite to actually populate with pictures after I picked them.
It isn’t surprising that the experience has some teething problems for people not in the Apple framework. For starters, where an iPhone user can go straight to the invitation using your link (assuming they’re already signed into iCloud), Android users have to enter their email address and then a verification code to get in. They’ll also need to sign up for an Apple account to look at a photo album if you add one, and Android user or not, your friends need an Apple Music subscription to hear your playlist (otherwise, they’ll only get a preview of it).
None of that will keep Android users from seeing key details about your event or RSVPing to it, but it’ll be obvious that they aren’t getting the whole experience. Event invite app Partiful offers largely the same experience — maybe a little too samey, as the app’s developers insinuated today — while remaining a “platform-agnostic product,” Partiful cofounder and CEO Shreya Murthy said in a statement emailed to The Verge.