Apple officially kills Clips app, ends updates after seven years

Apple has officially discontinued its Clips app, which is no longer available on the App Store. The company confirmed it will not release any new updates for the app.

Users who have Clips installed can continue to use it on iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 or earlier operating system versions.

Clips will no longer receive new updates

Since Apple will no longer release new updates to Clips, it will become difficult to use the app in the future. 

Apple recommends that users save their Clips videos to the Photo library or other storage options. Users can save the videos with effects included, or they can download them without any effects. 

Apple said users can make new videos using their clips through iMovie or pivot to other third-party applications. The company recommended third-party apps like InShot, VN Video Editor, and GoPro Quik to create new videos. 

Apple released Clips back in 2017 in an attempt to compete with Snapchat and Instagram stories. Clips was an app that let users apply filters, use music, or stitch photos, but it wasn’t a social media app. Throughout the years, Apple upgraded Clips and added new features to the app, but later on, the company limited its updates to bug fixes.

Apple’s subreddit users were not surprised by the discontinuation of Clips. One user wrote, “Makes sense. Didn’t even know it existed.” Another user said that he tried the app a long time ago and found it confusing. 

A top 1% comment on Reddit voices his input and said Clips is probably a single developer project. He gave an example and said, “Apple iTunes Remote was originally an app made by one guy. Now its TV functionality is part of the control center and he’s kinda done.” 

Video editing and creation tools have evolved quickly thanks to artificial intelligence. Apps like Sora from OpenAI and Veo3 from Google are super popular right now. Sora recently surpassed 1 million downloads on the App Store, while Veo 3 has over 500,000 downloads on Google Play.

This is not the first time Apple has discontinued some of its iOS or macOS apps. In 2015, Apple said goodbye to Newsstand, an app designed for downloading and displaying digital versions of newspaper and magazine content on iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. The company replaced the app with Apple News with the release of iOS 9, which offered a unified reading experience. 

Through the years, Apple has phased out several other apps, including iPhoto, Aperture, iDVD, iWeb, and Baby Shaker, a controversial gaming app released in 2009 that simulated shaking a baby to silence it. Apple faced massive backlash at the time and removed the app just two days after its release.

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