Today Apple released Apple Invites, an app that makes it easy to send invites to birthday parties, game nights, and graduation parties.

I’m a founder of Luma, an app that makes it easy to create event pages, sell tickets, and send event invites. Sounds similar!

Design In terms of design, this app fits in with other modern Apple apps where parts of the app are incredibly fluid while the rest of it is clunky and confusing.

The good - The app has a very nice welcome animation, the event pages look nice, and it’s cool that you can easily link an Apple Photos album.

The ugly - The web experience is awful with pages that sometimes don’t load and otherwise require signing into Apple. There is no way to send multiple invites at once. The suggested event backgrounds feel very dated.

Audience This app is intended for small family and friend events and I think it could be particularly useful for kids birthday parties because it has a +1 feature that would help you register your family. But overall the app is implemented pretty poorly. For example, it’s really easy to miss the +1 option when registering for an event.

I expect this app to do about as well as the Journal app Apple released last year. Invites isn’t bundled with your phone, so you’ll have to know about the app to download it. There will be some virality where people will download it after they are invited to an event, but I think that will be pretty minor.

Business Model I think Apple has the perfect business model for this app in that they don’t need to make money.

There have been tons of apps to send invites to parties - Evite, Paperless Post, Facebook Events, Partiful, Luma, etc. The older generation of event invite apps (Evite, Paperless Post) charge for sending invites which only really makes sense for special events like weddings. Partiful is free and has raised a lot of money but they haven’t shared how they will make money.

Apple’s business model works because the “personal events” market is pretty small. Facebook Events was doing really well in my demographic but Facebook stopped investing in it, in part because everything else on Facebook and Instagram was just so much more important. Most people don’t spend that much time going to social events, so you can’t serve them ads. And these events are free, so people don’t want to pay for an app.

To make money in events, you typically need to go either into paid tickets or corporate events. Ticketmaster is the biggest player here but they are weird since they have a monopoly on large events and they operate a ton of venues. Eventbrite is the leading self-serve ticketing app and while they have a ton of revenue, the company isn’t in good shape and has lost money in the last 6 of 8 quarters. Cvent is the biggest player in corporate events and even they aren’t that big; they got bought by Vista for $1.7B.

The problem with paid tickets and corporate events is that as you add these features, your app becomes worse for simple events. It’s much easier to send Paperless Post invites than Eventbrite invites even though both companies were founded at the same time. We have this issue with Luma - we’re trying to keep it as simple and as easy to use as possible, but it’s hard as power users ask for more and more.

So Apple has a great business model — they can release Invites for free without expecting to make money. But that means they also don’t care enough about it to do a good job.

Silly Takes I saw some funny takes on Twitter/X about this:

  • “This will expand the overall event market so it’s good for existing players.” Huh? I think the event companies only encourage people to host more at the very slim margin. Most people will have a birthday party with or without software to assist.
  • “This is copying (Sherlocking) Partiful.” I mean no, not really. Partiful is pretty directly inspired from Facebook Events. But there are similarities in Partiful, Apple Invites, Eventbrite, and Luma — it’s hard to have a truly novel UX for events and it’s not desired.
  • “This will kill X event company.” Apple is clearly not investing in this enough to kill or hurt any events company that has meaningful traction.

Ultimately, I wish Apple did a better job with this app. And at a higher level, I wish they just made Siri less stupid.