Partiful: A Partially-Appleton-Based App for Event Invitation and Posterior Preferences (Extended Version)

You can invite people by picking from your contacts, manually entering phone numbers or email addresses, or copying a link to your event and sending it from outside the app. The app also lets you choose whether each person is allowed to invite others, and you can send notes to invitees after the event is created.

The app appears to be very similar to Partiful, a popular event invitation service that was founded in 2020 and has blown up over the past few years. The interface of the services is mobile-friendly for responding to invites and getting event details. Partiful does not charge a fee, and it is much more focused on Gen Z.

Update, February 4th: This story has been updated to cover Apple Invite’s official launch; it initially covered the app leaking shortly before the announcement.

The event info is shown with a number of tools, such as a weather forecast and an Apple Maps box, that you can use to get directions. Apple Music can be used to create a photo album that people can peruse or add music to. All of that works mostly seamlessly on an iPhone, apart from some buggy behavior I encountered, like invitations that wouldn’t load and trouble getting the photo album in an invite to actually populate with pictures after I picked them.

The experience is a bit glitchy for people who aren’t fully immersed in the tech giant. For starters, where an iPhone user can go straight to the invitation using your link (assuming they’re already signed into iCloud), Android users have to enter their email address and then a verification code to get in. If you want your friends to see your photo album, you need to have an apple account and an apple Music subscription, which will only allow them to hear a preview of your song.

It will be obvious to users that they don’t get the whole experience, even if they are able to see key details about your event. Event invite app Partiful offers largely the same experience — maybe a little too samey, as the app’s developers insinuated today — while remaining a “platform-agnostic product,” Partiful cofounder and CEO Shreya Murthy said in a statement emailed to The Verge.