All the pieces ahve been a part of the Apple ecosystem for years, and finally Apple has introduced a new app and service called “Invites” that lets you create beautiful party invitations. You can limit attendance, track RSVPs, even create a shared playlist or photo album, all from your iPhone! Here’s how to get started…
Remember back in grade school when you’d fil out little cards and hand them out to all your friends in class, hoping they’d come to your birthday party? That’s long since been replaced with electronic party invitations and management systems. Evite used to be one of the biggest providers but it’s been eclipsed by Eventbrite, Poply, RSVPify, and similar. It’s tricky to get everything right, though, from the tools needed to create attractive invitations to the backend management tasks that allows for confirmations, private events, limited attendance, and more.
Jumping into the fray is Apple with its surprise introduction this week of “Invites“. An app for the iPhone that’s loosely integrated with Apple Intelligence (though you don’t have to enable AI to use Invites), it works through Apple’s iCloud cloud service. And, as is typical for Apple, it’s elegant for other Apple ecosystem users and clunky for people on the “other side” of the proverbial tracks with Android phones.
Let’s focus on the good parts, though. As it happens, I’m hosting a Super Bowl party on Sunday so thought it would be the perfect opportunity to try out Invites. Here’s how it went.
FIRST STEPS WITH APPLE INVITES
The new app doesn’t just show up on your iPhone, you’ll need to go into the App Store and download Invites. If you’ve already done so, check for updates; Apple released a bug fix update less than 48 hours after initial release! Once installed, tap on the cheery yellow “Invites” icon to get started. Here’s the splash screen:
Based on the second example invitation, I am apparently not alone in planning a party for the big football game. Go figure. 🙂
To proceed, tap on “Continue“.
This is interesting because it shows that your Invites home screen proves to be a combination of events you’re hosting and any that you’ve RSVP’d as a guest. Presumably, this will also tie directly into Calendar, though my party hasn’t automatically shown up on my own calendar as of this moment. A future capability?
TIME TO CREATE AN EVENT
To begin the creation process for my party, I’ll tap on “Create Event“. The process is basically to create the graphics (gotta look nice, right?), the date, the location, add any additional notes, and share the results with your potential guests.
This is a pretty wild color scheme, but I like it. No worries, we’ll be replacing everything here with new graphics, so the red graduation to purple is just a passing template image. Indeed, to begin, I’m going to add an image by tapping on the tiny picture icon at the top.
There are lots of options here, from emoji-based wallpapers to thematic party invitation photos, to your own photo library, the camera if you want to take a picture, and… ta daaa! … Apple’s Image Playground, an image creation program powered by Apple Intelligence. I’ll opt for that.
I’m not the biggest fan of Image Playground at this moment, but it’s created something reasonably interesting with the prompt “NFL football”. Perhaps reflecting my own interests, when I prompted it with just “football” it assumed I meant soccer. If you haven’t played with Image Playground, here’s a tutorial to check out: Get Started with Image Playground.
For our purposes, just be aware that it will create as many variations on the theme as you desire. It produces three automatically and if you keep swiping to the right, it’ll keep creating more and more images. Luckily, this first image is the least weird of them (tho the football looks more like it was part of deflategate than a regular ball!)
A tap on “Done” on the top right lets me proceed with the invitation creation process.
The earlier image didn’t indicate that we’d get a nice grassy foreground, but it works beautifully for the party invitation!
ALL THE PARTY INVITATION DETAILS
Now for the less exciting, but no less critical, additional aspects of the invitation: title, date, time, location, etc. These are all entered by tapping on the specific field and entering the desired info. I’ve specified a title and now it’s time to detail the date, start and end times:
Notice you don’t need to specify an end time if it’s an open ended party or event, you can even specify that it’s an all-day affair. A tap on “Done” and I can enter a location:
It’s a bit confusing that if you want to specify a location by name (like “my office”) you can’t just enter that in the Search Locations box as you can in Calendar, you have to use the bottom entry field, Location Name. Easy enough once you catch that nuance. One more important datum needs to be specified, a description of the event. Here’s what I wrote:
Looks good, and I’ve got all the key things covered: what, when, and where. To proceed, I’ll tap on “Done“.
PREVIEW YOUR INVITATION
With everything filled out the invitation is looking pretty legit:
In fact, I think I’m ready to move to the next step. This is done by tapping on the “Preview” button on the top right. The image shows up again, but this time it’s in the format that your guests will see.
Other than the football image being a little bit weird it all looks very good. A tap on “Next” moves to the last step: guests.
WHAT ABOUT THE GUEST LIST?
In a nod to modern times, Invites allows you to share a link, email guests, or share the invite on social media:
The notable feature here is “Approve Guests” which allows people to RSVP but you to then not accept that response if they’re not someone you want to have attend. This is important if you’re going to share or post the invitation in a public venue like a Facebook group or a Bluesky post.
You can also just “Copy Link” and paste it in messages, email, Signal posts, DMs, etc. I sent an invite to my daughter and here’s how it looked in Messages:
Very nice, and a single tap gets them to the event home page on iCloud. That’s it. Now I have an event all set up, the ability to easily share it on social media, email people, manage the attendee list, and much more. As is typical with Apple, I fully expect lots of improvements over the next few months too, so Invites 2026 will be way more fun than this, and it’s already pretty slick.
Oh! And when someone RSVP’s, I get notifications!
Now to clean up around the house so I’m ready for my guests…
Pro Tip: I’ve been writing tutorials for the Apple iPhone since they were first released. Please check out my extensive iPhone help area for lots and lots of useful content.