Surprise! I bet you didn’t have Apple launching a revamped calendar app on your Monday morning bingo card, but here we are. Over the weekend, Bloomberg‘s Power On newsletter hinted about an upcoming new calendar app from Apple for iOS 18. Confetti or Invites (no one knows what it’s called) is an iCloud-based calendar app that could launch this week.
Apple has been “seeking to revamp its calendar app” for years, and this is merely the first stage of change. As Bloomberg describes, the festive-sounding codename Confetti could be Apple’s way of gussying up a typically stuffy and regimented calendar app. We don’t know what Apple will call this app. If you look up information about what’s to come, the app is called “Invites.” Like Evite, Partiful, and the ever-enduring Facebook, the app will focus on sending and receiving invitations and managing those guestlists. There’s speculation that Genmoji would play a role in all this as a way for you to customize the Invites you send out with a signature bit of Apple flair. Whether this would be a separate app or a feature within the stock iOS Calendar app is unconfirmed.
This rumor has been percolating for a while. 9to5Mac was among the first to report on it after browsing iOS 18.3’s beta code. The blog’s code sleuths also found a web version of the invitations, which suggests that this is a way for Apple users to replace all the other third-party invite services out there with something more well-integrated and almost proprietary. It’s unclear how this would work with non-Apple-using users. I imagine you won’t be able to make the Apple-styled invitation without an iOS device or Mac.
Invites would likely feed into Apple Intelligence since that’s the name of the game lately for all in consumer technology. The app would pull data from an iOS daemon—a process that runs constantly in the background—called GroupKit. GroupKit manages database models for groups of people based on your contacts. Apple Intelligence could be the brain that manages those lists for you and suggests them when the timing is right based on the type of event you’re hosting and who you’re inviting.
Other tidbits to know are that it’s likely to be ad- and tracker-free, making it a better choice than Facebook and all those others and helping Apple hone in on that privacy narrative it’s been polishing all these days. There might also be Apple Photos integration for the ease of collecting pictures after the event and multiple calendar integration.
The advent of “Confetti,” or Invites, or whatever it will be called, will likely coincide with another iOS 18.3 push. The software started rolling out to iPhones and iPads last month, and according to 9to5Mac, we’re just waiting for Apple to activate it.
