App Clips

App Clips are tiny iPhone apps that are designed to accomplish a specific task, for example ordering a coffee, making a parking payment, and so on. App Clips are typically small in size, under 10MB, and can launch at the bottom of an iPhone’s screen without the need to find the full app or download it from the App Store. In other words, an App Clip is Apple’s name for a snippet of an app that can be used for a specific function without having to open up and use the full app.

As mentioned, a perfect example of a use case of App Clips is making a parking payment. Apple realized that requiring drivers in a new city, for example, to download a completely new app for a one-time use like making a parking payment is highly inefficient and not a great user experience.

If an App Clip is available for the app in question, an App Clip card will appear at the bottom of your phone and show the option to open it up. For example, if you want to make the parking payment, you can scan a QR code, NFC tag, or App Clip code at the parking lot. You’ll then be prompted to open up the App Clip, and can use Apple Pay to complete the payment. After you’ve completed the task, the App Clip disappears and the user doesn’t have to delete the app from their iPhone.

From a user experience perspective, App Clips are much more efficient for certain use cases. Aside from parking payments, a few other common examples of App Clips include:

• Renting a scooter
• Paying for food
• Creating wishlists of fashion items

As you can see, App Clips can be a useful way to attract new users to your app by offering a quick and valuable user experience. Since App Clips are by their nature limited in terms of what they can do, this can lead to a certain percentage of App Clips users to download the full app for the full user experience. As highlighted in our blog post on App Clips, you can start to understand the value of these truncated apps from a user acquisition perspective:

I’m not sure about you, but I don’t install hundreds or thousands of apps on my phone. I only install apps or games when I’ve been convinced that they’re going to be useful or interesting, or if I’m really desperate for a solution to a problem and I think that app might solve it for me. I don’t like cluttering up my phone with too many apps.

Here, I kind of feel like I was being led along a path. Each step is simple. No step feels like a big commitment or a major leap. In fact, it pretty much feels like tapping links on the web: no real effort, no big investment, no major commitment. 

What that means from a user acquisition point of view is that trying your app is now easy, quick, and entirely risk-free.

Since one of the main uses of App Clips is user acquisition for the full app, tracking and measuring the performance of the App Clip is crucial to success. In order to help app developers measure and attribute conversions, Singular is a leader in mobile attribution. With mobile attribution and the right user acquisition strategy, for example using App Clips to attract new users, this helps mobile developers scale their marketing efforts. In particular, Singular’s mobile attribution helps in the following ways:

• Measure and report on all the marketing channels you work with
• Analyze ROI by combining cost aggregation with attribution
• Track and analyze the entire customer journey

In summary, App Clips can be a valuable tool to acquire more users to your app, and Singular’s mobile attribution technology ensures that you’re accurately tracking and measuring the performance of your marketing campaigns.