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?

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.

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