Apple prepares to launch Confetti calendar invite system at employees for testing

AppleInsider

Apple's secretive event and meeting invite app is advancing in development, with an internal iCloud deployment within the company expected as early as the week of February 3.

Calendar app could get 'Confetti'

The second developer beta of iOS 18.3 included references to an unreleased internal app for dealing with event scheduling. Now, it appears Apple is preparing to launch an internal trial of the app in the near future.

Apple intends to introduce an app based on iCloud that will allow employees to invite others to events and meetings, reports Bloomberg's newsletter on Sunday. The app is reportedly codenamed "Confetti," a relatively festive name that plays on the whole invitation concept.

The introduction could happen as soon as the coming week, if not a little later, the publication predicts. The timing of the app's introduction is designed to coincide with the release of iOS 18.3.

Invites from "Invites"

While the Gurman newsletter is light on detail for "Confetti," the early January discovery in the iOS 18.3 developer beta offers a lot more information. That discovery, apparently known as "Invites" rather than "Confetti," was actually preceded by code references in iOS 18.2's betas, before being removed for the public OS release.

At the time, it was considered to be an extension of the existing changes Apple already made to the Calendar app in 2024. This includes scheduling reminders within the application.

With support for iCloud, "Invites" could allow more ways to schedule and organize meetings and in-person events. It was said to communicate with an iOS 18 daemon known as GroupKit.

As it's possible to schedule reminders from multiple apps in iOS 18, it's feasible that "Invites" could do the same for meetings and events. There's also the opportunity to use it with Apple Intelligence so users could add Genmoji to invites.

While little is truly known about the workings of "Invites," and by extension "Confetti," it does seem certain that the app will be about meeting invitations in some way.

Since Apple seems intent on "dogfooding" the app in its development, it may be a considerable amount of time before it becomes a publicly usable tool.

Rumor Score: Possible

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anonymouse

AppleInsider said:

... It was said to communicate with an iOS 18 daemon known as GroupKit. ...

GroupKit seems like an unlikely name for a daemon, more like an API. An associated daemon would more likely be named something like GroupKitService or GroupKitServer.

braytonak

If it’s an internal tool then there’s little point in knowing about it. 

That said, maybe this came into existence out of frustration with the Calendar app’s limitations and will eventually be used to improve it.  

<Anecdote>

I often invite my personal and employer (Microsoft 365 then Google) calendars to events like vacations, or add my spouse’s iCloud calendar for things like doctor visits. Every single time I’m thoroughly disappointed. 

Sometimes invites appear in the Calendar anpp’s inbox view, usually not. A recent invite from my husband came in with completely incorrect time and date. (How do you mess that up without blaming time zones?)

Sometimes you can accept an invite from the email notification, but that’s usually borked. One should not have to know how to use ICS files. 

</Anecdote>

Random thought, why do day-of reminders for all-day events have to be at 9 AM? 

<Opinion>

I have to give Microsoft top rating for their calendar, Google second, and Apple third. Microsoft presents a snippet view of the calendar directly in the email inbox list view, and invites tend to be received and parsed more reliably. 

Apple makes a lot of money on services but they’re don’t focus on making them great. 

</Opinion>

dewme

braytonak said:

If it’s an internal tool then there’s little point in knowing about it. 

That said, maybe this came into existence out of frustration with the Calendar app’s limitations and will eventually be used to improve it.  

<Anecdote>

I often invite my personal and employer (Microsoft 365 then Google) calendars to events like vacations, or add my spouse’s iCloud calendar for things like doctor visits. Every single time I’m thoroughly disappointed. 

Sometimes invites appear in the Calendar anpp’s inbox view, usually not. A recent invite from my husband came in with completely incorrect time and date. (How do you mess that up without blaming time zones?)

Sometimes you can accept an invite from the email notification, but that’s usually borked. One should not have to know how to use ICS files. 

</Anecdote>

Random thought, why do day-of reminders for all-day events have to be at 9 AM? 

<Opinion>

I have to give Microsoft top rating for their calendar, Google second, and Apple third. Microsoft presents a snippet view of the calendar directly in the email inbox list view, and invites tend to be received and parsed more reliably. 

Apple makes a lot of money on services but they’re don’t focus on making them great. 

</Opinion>

I agree that using Apple Mail with other mail apps seems to be less than reliable. I can usually get what I want to work but doing so requires jumping through a few hoops, like using ICS files. As far as default time for all-day events you can change the defaults in Settings/Apps/Calendar. I set all the defaults to None to allow me to set my own start times. What I’ve done to share calendar events with my partner is to create another calendar with a name like “Share with person’s name.” In my case it’s good enough because all of my calendar events are either just for me or shared with another person or persons. Using different calendar color bars allows me to glance at my calendar and see singular events and shared events easily. But yeah, this could get clunky if you have a lot of combinations of invitees.

Of course, like all things Apple, the built-in tools always work best if everyone involved is using Apple stuff. That’s just Apple being Apple. You don’t have to step very far into the Apple ecosystem before coming to that realization. It is what it is. Some of us like it, at least most of the time.

I’ve used a lot of different email and email plus kitchen sink apps over the years. When I started with Outlook I thought it was a breath of fresh compared to Lotus Notes, which I loathed. But Outlook has gotten very bloated and being tethered to Micrsoft’s Exchange server based applications was never what I’d call a pleasant experience for cross platform users. I personally don’t like having email and calendar bound together for personal use, but for corporate environments it seems to work quite well for a lot of users. For personal use the integrated functions are too cumbersome for me. I tried using Outlook for all of my personal email, including iCloud, and it failed miserably. I ended up losing all of my contacts on all of my machines. I must have done something stupid, but I couldn’t trace my path of stupidity back to the root cause so I decided just to stick with Apple Mail and Apple Calendar as separate tools. Thank you Time Machine. Apple Calendar works for my now-much-simpler needs. If I need a shared group calendar I use Google Calendar.

I actually don’t mind using ICS files for certain situations. For example, I can put links to an ICS files on a web site that lets users put a reminder in their calendar for an event where I don’t know who all the invitees will be ahead of time. All users have to do is click on a “Remind Me” link of some sort and it launches their calendar program that knows how to work with ICS files. This seems to work well across many different calendar platforms.

ddawson100

"Can't innovate anymore, my ass." /s 

Bringing invites to calendar will make an important incremental improvement to Calendar. That's what they need to do, just keep adding things. This really seems decades past due but, sure, bring it on. And please keep bringing things on.