Apple Invites

I'm in my mid-thirties and most of my friends have ditched Facebook. I didn't really realize this until when I used it to create an event for a house party... I was somewhat surprised that only 2 people out of 15 even saw it. I ended up resorting to good old text message and that worked, but it was tedious. Not sure how popular this will become, but having a social-media-less event invite/broadcasting system would be nice, and having one that most people with an iPhone have access to covers much of my friend base

Here friends just send a message on WhatsApp. I do not know anyone who has hosted a house party of 79800 people so that they are struggling with this. But then again I guess some geographies have it more complicated, isn't it?

For people in their early 20s to mid 30s in the NYC area, I'm starting to see mass adoption of an app called Partiful for managing social invites and events, it has a lot of nice features for sending invites, RSVP management, sending text blasts out to attendees (you can schedule reminders the day before or whatever).

I don't think it's that they've entirely ditched FB, but FB is genuinely terrible at surfacing event invites. It would prefer you to have to scroll through a bunch of irrelevant garbage in your feed that it had "recommended" instead so the product team can high five themselves over badly designed engagement metrics rather than worry if the users don't actively despise their product.

A (for most of the world, in any case) possibly surprising fact about the US is that WhatsApp is not very popular there.

This indeed causes problems when wanting to create a quick ad-hoc group for a party invitation etc., if at least one of the invitees is not an iPhone user.

> Not sure how popular this will become

Since Apple was too lazy to make it into a standard, it will probably go the way of App Clips. Niche idea, too few users to adopt it and no stakeholders with enough control to make it popular on other platforms.

My social group also uses Partiful. It works great, but it's a little worrying that it's so useful while being free: I can't see how this possibly could make money, so I assume the enshittification is coming any second now.

It causes problems if one of the iPhone owners isn't an active iCloud+ subscriber:

> Creation of invitations requires an iCloud+ subscription.

This isn't about making life easier on people, this is about getting you to subscribe to Apple's services for access to a REST API. Apple gets some benefit of the doubt, but this is literally Slop-as-a-Service.

I can't tell what you're arguing here – are you misunderstanding what you quoted from the FAQ? Only the person who creates the event needs to have an iCloud+ subscription. Everyone else can RSVP to it regardless of whether they have an iCloud+ subscription or even an Apple device at all.

> Do invitees need to have an Apple device with the app to attend an event?

> Apple Invites is for everyone. Guests don’t need the app, an Apple device, or an account to RSVP to an event.

Source: www.icloud.com/invites

Why are you intentionally misrepresenting what they said?

I'm still on facebook and a lot of my friends still are, the main problem we have with facebook events it that almost no one sees them. This section has been over loaded with suggestions to event you might have no links with of things your remote friends are going to take part of.

Platform fragmentation is a generational thing.

I thought email was a common denominator but I learned most people don’t check email or check it rarely. So different from the days when everyone had email.

I still use FB and so do many of my friends my age (mid to late 40s). But a bunch have also migrated to Instagram.

Among the younger generation, you’re a millennial if you’re on instagram because they’ve moved to TikTok. FB folks are over the hill. There’s a generational divide and pride in being trendy.

WhatsApp is only a thing among my international friends — many Americans don’t have it.

The only universal now is text messages but it feels so clunky (even with iMessage).

Partiful works but to me it lacks polish. It feels like MySpace when FB first came out.

> I'm in my mid-thirties and most of my friends have ditched Facebook.

Marketplace seems to be one of the main use cases that's still relatively popular.

My guess: certain features will just become pro-only

> having one that most people with an iPhone have access to covers much of my friend base

Luckily - you don’t need an iPhone or iCloud account to receive an invite and RSVP to it. Might be harder (or impossible?) to add to photos and music, but you can still get an invite and RSVP to it.

In fact, Apple Invites appears to be a direct response to the popularity of Partiful.

I wonder if it is rooted in similar things though. Right, like with email. People don't really read or check emails because spam became a serious problem. Then with social media, looking at facebook, there is definitely a big different in ad space in facebook between the time I used to use it to now. Where ads have effectively become the "spam" equivalent for social media. Ultimately, did success of these technologies also lead to its demise. Email was so good, so it made sense for a market of spammers. Facebook became a prime place for ads, and as ads become more and more of the platform, people started to consciously or subconsciously step away to other platforms.

The only reason I have WhatsApp is that a couple non-US friends use it from time to time. No one I know in the US does anything other than standard text messaging whether or not it ends up being iMessage.

It's also the only bit of Facebook that hasn't turned into an endless stream of trash. I expect that not to last either, if you're looking for an idea then a localised marketplace alternative with social proof should be on your radar.

Marketplace and groups. Most of my friends are on WhatsApp so we ditched FB.

Apple would be smart to build those things and make it available on Android too. Then we could ditch FB altogether.

My first thought. I’m surprised it’s not everyone’s first thought. Everyone in the bay that I know uses that for parties. Clearly every tech company is aware off the ubiquity of that app at least

I think you've hit the nail on the head of the problem.

A lot of comments online claim that people don't care about spam, or think that advertisements are a good thing for a free service, or at the very least won't change their habits if given an alternative. If that's the case then what's a better explanation for your observations?

I argue that people do care, even if it's perhaps not expressed in words.

Yep, groups was essentially all I used FB for until we moved to Discord (which much better for us), I was so glad when I could stop checking FB completely.

It’s interesting that WhatsApp never caught on in the US. It’s ubiquitous amongst everyone I know. Android use also seems to be much larger in Europe

>People don't really read or check emails because spam became a serious problem.

With the tabs in Gmail, very little leaks through to my primary inbox that isn't relatively immediately relevant (and not a lot of mail total). Often don't look at Promotions at all and maybe glance at Updates once a day or so.

Email is useful for me though, yes, a lot of my interaction with my circle of friends is over texts.

It still has a lot of trash, but 90% of it is trash you experience as a seller. Scammers are still really common, and I doubt the moderation has gotten much better since I failed to sell an empty aquarium because they couldn't be convinced it didn't have fish in it (although based on everything else on Facebook, there probably is just no moderation now).

It’s the community and interest groups that are really hard to migrate. There needs to be an easy migration route or something.

Other wise FB is really garbage. Just irrelevant suggestions and no amount of blocking trains the algorithm since they are just trying to make money.

I don't remember the exact timeline but I think SMS became free (bundled with mobile phone plan) in the US before WhatsApp became popular. And most of us don't interact via chat very much internationally. So (probably) most people just default to SMS/iMessage unless there's a reason to do something differently. And even the one person I regularly communicate with chat in Europe, we default to Facebook Messenger.

A lot of legitimate email (password resets and stuff) gets eaten up by spam filters

Literally they just need to add ticketing with a small fee. They are sitting on a huge revenue stream they just haven't need to roll out yet.

For a long time they were heavily promoting "Ships to You" non-local goods. Annoying. Lots of dropshipper type stuff rather than a local unique items. Marketplace seems to have backed off that in the last year(s) though, my feed seems very local, one-off, and "real.

And in the Northeast, this is the first time I've even heard of it. (Though I doubt I'm the target market.)

I'm curious in what way you think so? It's both attractive and easy to use for me.

The problem for me is not so much real spam, this gets filtered. The problem is the massive amount of work required to unsubscribe or clean up automated emails from apps and websites, both transactional and non-transactional.

I know way too many techy and non-techy people who have thousands of unread email messages from those apps.

A lot of people I know don't really answer to real email anymore, unless they know something is coming. It became just something you use to make accounts with.

Even corporate email is dying. 99% of my inbox is transactional emails from SaaS apps and spam from apps I forgot to delete. And 90% of the rest is spam from recruiters or people trying to sell me some product. Only 0.1% is legitimate.

Statistically, email is not for people anymore, period.

I'm in my mid 40s, my friends mostly use email for organising events more than a week or two in the future, google chat or WhatsApp for more spontaneous things.

Very occasional FB invites for things when casting the net wide, like, I'm back in town and having a picnic, everyone come.

We have a family email domain for my extended family, administered by a few retired but very tech-savvy relatives (both had long IT careers) and it’s roughly 50:50 whether a message sent to everyone@ lastname.com will actually show up in people’s inboxes or not. It’s probably 75:25 that a reply all to that list will show up, but modern email is a dumpster fire.

There is still a lot of "spam" if you don't spend the effort creating filters or unsubscribing to the new notification list that companies like to make every few months. Hell, my inbox is covered in invoices, receipts, disclosures, required actions, ToS changes, etc., even though I've spent some time setting up filters for some of the common receipts.

Yeah, this is straight up f.lux 2.0 where Apple saw an idea take off, and unlike 'Nightshift' where they connected it to their new 'Health' product to stimulate Apple Watch purchases, they connected Apple Invites to social behaviors to stimulate iMessage and iCloud adoption and revenues.

Experiences differ. I did go on unsubscribe jags from time to time at my last employer because I ended up on email lists from a lot of events.

But really, I get 5-10 emails a day now in my primary inbox and I don't really have many filters. I DO get a lot in Promotions and Updates, but most of the stuff in Promos I can safely ignore and I mostly keep my eye on Updates if I'm expecting something I might want to deal with there.

Email is still my primary channel for the most part.

What would a standard for party invites be?

ics files and CalDAV are sort of an Apple standard.

People in Europe are poorer. Android is cheaper.

My wife is late 40s and just deleted her facebook account, and she's the most FOMO person I know - and she did this because of zuck capitulating to trump. A lot of people have had it with companies supporting fascists.

iCalendar is RFC 2245[0], written by Microsoft and Lotus. CalDAV is RFC 4791[1] written by Apple, Oracle, and CommerceNet. Those are examples of open standards that Apple happens to use, but aren't Apple standards in the sense that they're something they cooked up internally by themselves.

[0] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2445

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4791

Yep I second this, I usually find out that I've been invited to an event when someone makes a post in the event, and often not from the event invite itself.

There’s no right or wrong answer but as someone who used to work in publishing, the typeface seems contrived to be amateurish. I wonder if it’s supposed to evoke a more “authentic” unpolished feel? (YouTubers actually find too much polish reduces engagement among younger people)

The pictures are also a bit amateurish but this is more a function of the inviter. On other platforms much of the design choices are made for you so there’s a lower bar but for me, partiful seems to want to hit the kind of “having street cred” aesthetic.

This is a typical partiful aesthetic.

https://images.app.goo.gl/ufJafvhXoBtaF6QE8

Problem with Discord is you have to enforce real names otherwise you have to limit it to people you know.

Young people I know (except for gamers) find Discord a bit sus because you don’t have any baseline with regard to name or profile pic. Also who already knows who. Discord doesn’t expose any social network outside of the specific server.

You would think Discord would be the community of choice for Gen Z but in reality it’s limited to gamer and gamer adjacent folks.

Turns out identity and known social network are still things people look for to achieve a base level of trust for real time chat.

Reddit and HN are more topic driven, but chat somehow feels more personal.

It’s remarkable how this has changed. Back in what I call the “Facebook golden age” (2012-2016), before it turned to complete crap, it was unthinkable to host an event that was NOT organized by Facebook. I recall throwing birthday and holiday parties and all I had to do was scroll through my friends list and invite everyone and that was that. Everyone would see it and everyone would RSVP.

Oh well - it was nice while it lasted.

The parent's chat group for my toddler's school is WhatsApp. There was nobody who didn't have it installed (and it's about 50/50 android/iPhone).

I can't imagine something like this is expensive to host, minus perhaps the text messages. But presumably they could charge for those (and make a little off the top).

People currently use Instagram stories for this a lot and it's absolutely wild how Meta hasn't caught on and built in any sort of infrastructure for you to save and keep track of events.

I uses the business version of Office 365 for e-mail. It works well. I never have a problem with e-mails not being delivered or going into a SPAM folder. I am not saying your family did anything wrong. What I am saying is e-mail works well for some people.

So is she going to also do away with anything related to Elon, Tim and the like?

Yes, I was also a big Facebook user in my twenties and now I'm in my mid-thirties and it seems Facebook became a lot less useful for this decade of my life. For the birthdays of children in my social surroundings it seems the best practice has become to create an image with the details of the birthday party. Usually a photo of the birthday child with written Alice is turning 3. Join us for an afternoon of fun at Address on Saturday 16:00. Usually shared on Whatsapp either in direct messages or in an existing school group if you are inviting the whole class or in ad-hoc group created for the event literally called Alice Birthday Party

> zuck capitulating to trump

So did Tim Cook. Is she binning her iPhone?

> Apple Invites is for everyone. Guests don’t need the app, an Apple device, or an account to RSVP to an event.

Right, so how do they get and respond to the invite? I'm guessing SMS or email, making the whole thing pointless.

Yeah, unfortunately that seems to be the best way to handle this kind of thing but unfortunately that costs $6/person/month so our ~50 person casual email list for organizing fantasy football and family reunions would cost almost $4k/year.

Why is that pointless?

Yes. She's very serious about it.

We don't have iPhones. We ditched Apple a long time ago.

Spam filters can be trained. Just mark anything you don't want and didn't explicitly sign up to as spam, "legitimate" sender or not. Problem solved.

Sounds like lots of transactional mail for services you signed up to with that mail. Sign up to less crap or use a different mail from the one you use to communicate with real people.

Is this using some cloud-based email host where you don't have any control over the spam filter? Otherwise, whitelisting (verified) senders from your own dowmain should be very much possible.

E-Mail isn't some magic that randomly drops mails. Mail servers are even resilient against network problems and will retry dilevery MANY times. What you are describing is NOT normal and would make using it for business basically impossible, which is not the case since email is still the primary b2b communication method for many companies.

Lol so you/your wife were OK with all the spying and manipulation via ads but not being negative enough towards the democratically elected president is where you draw the line? Hysterical.

I used to use a separate email when I ordered things etc. Once Gmail tabs came in, I pretty much stopped doing so because it was too much trouble to monitor a second email address because I actually care about receipts, order tracking, etc. a lot of the time.

If everyone in a city wants to go crap in some place, I'm not gonna be the one cleaning their shit. I'm just gonna stop coming there.

Email is just a public toilet. I'm not gonna work hard so I can pretend it's a five star restaurant.

I'm already doing my part by not making it worse.