Apple announced App Clips at last year’s WWDC14. If you’re not familiar with them yet, they are bite-sized apps that your users can use without having to take a trip to the App Store.
In other words, App Clips offer your users an opportunity to experience your app before downloading it from the app store. This is especially useful for applications that offer instant services such as renting scooters, ordering food, setting up smart appliances, etc. App Clips bridge the gap between learning about the app and downloading it from the App Store.
There are multiple ways to invoke an App Clip — through your website’s smart banner, on iMessage and Maps, or with an App Clip Code, which is Apple’s version of a QR code.
App Clips are an exciting feature but come with some limitations. So, here are a few things you should keep in mind when building them for your application.
1. Prioritize unauthenticated features
One of your priorities when designing your App Clip should be to remove as many barriers for your users as possible. For example, requiring users to sign up or find their username and password can be cumbersome. So, whenever possible, design your App Clip to provide the full experience to users without asking them to log in.
2. Use “one-touch” features
Sometimes there’s no way around it, and you absolutely need your users to sign in or provide payment/shipping information.
In these situations, consider using “one-touch” features like Sign In With Apple and Apple Pay. Working with these features makes the experience seamless and painless.
3. Direct users to your full app
Ideally, your App Clip will leave users wanting more. Apple provides us with the SKOverlay class to present a banner inside the App Clip that, when tapped, will take users to the product page for your application in the App Store. You can retain any information the user has provided for a seamless transition to the full app. So, users don’t have to enter the same information twice.
If you’re using UIKit, you can trigger it with a windowScene reference, which you can get from any presented view. This example code could be triggered from a UIViewController instance:
guard let scene = view.window?.windowScene else { return }
let configuration = SKOverlay.AppClipConfiguration(position: .bottom)
let overlay = SKOverlay(configuration: configuration)
overlay.present(in: scene)
If you’re working with SwiftUI, presenting the overlay is a bit simpler. All you have to do is to call the appStoreOverlay(…) modifier like this:
ContentView()
.appStoreOverlay(isPresented: $overlayPresented, configuration:
SKOverlay.AppClipConfiguration(position: .bottom))
You can present the overlay anytime you want. Still, we recommend presenting it once the user completes an action, especially if it’s an action that can be repeated or continued in your full application.
4. Reuse some of your app’s code
The fastest way to build an App Clip is to pick some of the existing features in your application, add them to the App Clip target, and configure your App Clip’s SceneDelegate to open those features.
Sometimes, though, the code in your app might get too tangled, and adding just a few files into your App Clip might take a lot of work. If this is your case, you can start your App Clip from scratch or take advantage of the opportunity and improve your codebase.
Since App Clips are only available in iOS 14, another alternative is to take this opportunity to learn the newest technologies, like SwiftUI or Combine, that aren’t available on previous versions.
5. Mind the size limit
App Clips have a size limit of 10MB, which means that you probably won’t be able to add all your code and assets from your full app and make it an App Clip.
When designing your App Clip, keep this limit in mind and choose which features and assets you will implement and include in your clip.
The size limit means that you probably won’t be able to include all the internal and external libraries that you are using in your full application.
6. Be smart when encoding your URLs
A lesser-known limit of App Clips, or in this case App Clip Codes, is that they have a character limit. In our tests, this is about 32 bytes, excluding the required https:// prefix.
There are some keywords that are encoded more efficiently into App Clip Codes. When relevant, you should try to use these to avoid hitting the limit. You can find the list here.
When using URL arguments, using the names p, p1, p2, p3, etc., will also help your URL be encoded more efficiently.
You can find all the suggestions provided by Apple here.
7. Don’t expect users to come back to clip
Once they are installed, App Clips are not added to the home screen like regular apps, and after 30 days, they’ll be automatically removed from your user’s device.
For these reasons, you shouldn’t count on your users coming back to your App Clip like they would on a complete application.
Features like adding favorites might go unused. If you decide to implement a feature that allows users to save data, ensure that the data also gets saved in the full application if users decide to install it. This will ensure that users don’t have to enter their data twice.
8. Use ephemeral notifications
If you enable push notifications on your App Clip, ephemeral permission will be granted when the clip is installed unless your user explicitly disables it.
For the next eight hours, you will be able to send push notifications to your user, and no prompt will be shown to your user.
You can use this to continue engaging with your user. For example, if they leave items in their shopping cart, you could send them a notification reminding them about it.
A New Paradigm of App Development
The existing approach of downloading and installing apps isn’t the most elegant solution, especially for apps that don’t require frequent usage. No wonder our phones are packed with apps we don’t even remember installing.
PC Mag’s Sascha Segan describes app clips as “the start of a new paradigm of app development that will become richer with 5G.” Whether App Clips are here to stay remains to be seen, but there is little doubt that the future of applications is in the cloud, not in our personal storage space. As networks get faster and cloud storage becomes cheaper, App Clips might be the starting point for a more seamless smartphone experience.
