Week 385 was posted by Charanjit Chana on 2025-03-13.
App Clips have been a thing since 2020 and I've only ever seen one. It was a portfolio piece for someone that I've been thinking about since I saw it and this week I decided to create my own.
It was rejected, because the app it was associated with was too thin with a limited audience. The app clip and the app were the same thing in reality. There was no reason to download my app, when the App Clip did it all. So here are my thoughts on App Clips at the start of 2025.
Restaurants
Nearly every demo for App Clips involves some mention of ordering on the go. I'm not saying a restaurant shouldn't have an app, but an App Clip would make a great way to share menus and take orders, especially for infrequent visitors or for someone out of town.
Maybe there's even a way to track rewards, but I am pretty fed up of needing an app for nearly every restaurant in our city centre.
My wife and I took some time to swap Apple Wallet loyalty cards so we've got the same on both phones when we're at the checkout. Makes building rewards a lot easier.
Digital Business Cards
Whether we're talking businesses or individuals, they would make a fantastic virtual business card. This is what I tried to get into the App Store, but can't because that's all it was...
Stand Alone App Clips
It sucks you can separate them from apps, the feedback I got from App Store Review was to basically launch a website instead.
I have a website (multiple!) and want something in the App Store! I don't think my ask was unreasonable, but hiding my App Clip away inside an app seems silly to me and I would have thought that would lead to the rejection of an app as it would be unrelated to it's function.
Configuration Hell
Understand how it all fit together was probably tougher than it should have been with errors only visible after submission and once I'd got it all through, Apple's AASA file caching is pretty aggressive so you get shown errors in App Store Connect that you fix but you have no feedback until that cache has cleared.
Growing File Limits
Size limits continue to grow, my feeling is that it relates to a lack of adoption and trying to make it easier for existing apps to take advantage of, but I think they need to pause on that on focus on defining what an appropriate use for App Clips would be.
In Summary
App Clips have lots of things going for them but I am not seeing them in the wild. I am trying to introduce them in the next app I'll be building and it will be a requirement, rather than a nice-to-have, for anything else I build going forward.
Tags: appclip, development