ADR 20: No App Intents action tier

Accepted, 2026-10-05.

Context

Apps increasingly declare what they can do as App Intents, for Siri, Shortcuts and Apple Intelligence. The proposal was a resolution tier above exact: where an app declares an intent for what the agent wants, invoke it instead of tapping through the screens that lead there. It is the most “agentic” lever available, since it acts on meaning rather than on pixels.

The governing rule set the bar before anything was built: adopt it only if an eval task shows taps are the bottleneck. The spike asked two narrower questions as well. Can the intents be found from outside the app, and can one be invoked?

What was found

Finding them works, on a simulator only. An app that declares intents ships Metadata.appintents/extract.actionsdata in its bundle: JSON naming each intent, its parameters, whether it opens the app, and the Siri phrases of its App Shortcuts. The iOS 27.0 simulator runtime carries 76 intents across 13 apps, and Siri phrases for 5 of them in 4 apps. A phone’s system app bundles cannot be read.

• Settings declares none. It is the app nearly every eval task runs in.
• The system-wide intents are launch an app, close an app, and show the home screen, which launch_app and press_button already do.

Invoking them does not work. There is one route from outside the app that needs no user setup: WebDriverAgent exposes XCTest’s XCUISiriService at POST /session/{id}/wda/siri/activate, which types a request to Siri.

where	phrase, from the app’s own metadata	what happened
simulator, iOS 27.0	“Create a new reminder in Reminders”	blocked 35.4s, reported success, changed nothing
iPhone 17 Pro Max, iOS 26.6.1	the same	0.6s; Siri’s own reminder dialog asked what to remind about; the app never opened
the same phone	“Open Favorites in Photos”	0.4s; Siri read out the iPhone User Guide’s tap steps for finding Favorites

Typed Siri sends a phrase to its own domains and to general knowledge before an app’s App Shortcuts, and the call reports success whichever it chose. A tier that cannot tell whether it acted is worse than none, because the verifier would have to observe anyway, and the taps it was meant to replace would follow.

The other routes need someone first. shortcuts://run-shortcut runs only a shortcut the user already made. Spotlight lists App Shortcuts, but reaching one there is a search and a tap, which is the tap route through a different screen.

The rule fails on its own terms. Actions run at 1.14x the oracle, and the excess comes from perception faults, not from routes that are long. The one task built to need outside knowledge, set_quiet_hours, ran at the oracle’s floor (ADR 0012). No eval task runs in an app that declares an intent.

Decision

No App Intents tier, and no Siri tool. Nothing was added to the code.

Consequences

• Actions stay taps, typing and gestures, resolved against the tree. Where an app supports a deep link, open_url already skips the route.
• The bundle metadata reader was a scratch script and was not kept. It would matter only alongside an invocation route that works.
• What would reopen it: a way to invoke a named intent from outside the app that reports which intent ran, without routing through Siri’s own domains; and an eval task, in an app that declares the intent, where the tap route is long enough to be the measured bottleneck. Either alone is not enough.