Coming up: Bitrise App Clip support & workshop
Great news! Full App Clip support will be available on Bitrise from next week. To help you make the most out of it, we also organized a workshop, led by Guilherme Rambo where you can learn how to design, develop, and distribute App Clips for your app or for other businesses. We also discussed the main issues you’re likely to run into when trying to reuse existing code and assets for an App Clip experience, and how to use Bitrise to include your App Clip in your CI workflow. At the end of the workshop, not only you’ll know what makes a good App Clip, but will be able to create one with a streamlined user experience. You can sign up for the App Clips workshop on-demand here. 🔥
What are App Clips?
These days, there’s an app for everything. We’ve likely all found ourselves in situations where we needed an app for a specific one-time use, whether it’s buying coffee, paying for parking, or entering an event. Until now, the process looked something like this: we had to download them from the App Store, create an account, and enter our payment details all for the sake of completing a single transaction. With the launch of iOS 14, a lot has changed: apps are moving beyond the App Store, thanks to App Clips. They are small pieces of apps designed for real-world environments: all we have to do is hold our phone up to scan an NFC tag or QR code, use Apple Pay to pay and we’re good to go.
App Clips in real life — where are they?
In preparation for this blog post, we’ve researched real-life examples of App Clips, but only encountered a couple — mostly the ones already presented at the WWDC. We even started a thread on Reddit, asking the community about whether they’ve seen any examples, only to find out that the vast majority have not.
While most of us have yet to try App Clips in the real world, we can at least show you a great example — thanks to one of our Bitrise Experts, Kishikawa Katsumi, who found this in a Japanese coffee shop:
It seems that even though App Clips are a transformative technology for the future, we’ll have to wait a while to learn how popular they’ll become. It’s very much possible that App Clips will soon be omnipresent in our lives — we might find an App Clip at every table in a restaurant, in retail stores for instant payments, concerts, medical check-ups, and so on. They could span all sorts of other creative uses we cannot even imagine yet: let’s say, in a decade, we’ll use AR glasses to make the interaction with App Clips even easier. Only time will tell their fate, but some things are for sure: they have the potential to complement physical experiences with digital convenience and they can also help acquire new users.
Let us know if you’ve encountered any great real-life examples of App Clips! If you have any questions you’d like us to discuss at the workshop, get in touch with us via our Twitter page, or drop us a line at [email protected].
