Apple Announces the End-of-Life for Clips

Apple Support:

The Clips app is no longer being updated, and will no longer be available for download for new users as of October 10, 2025. You can continue to use Clips on iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 or earlier.

Clips is such an interesting story. It really was a great app. Back in 2017, when version 2.0 arrived (just six months after 1.0), I described it as “the single best example of a productivity app designed for iOS”. I stand by that. Clips was a very ambitious app that really pushed the state of the art in iOS UI design forward in so many ways. The general knock on iOS has always been that it’s a platform for content consumption, not creation. Clips was all about creation.

But, for as many great ideas as Clips contained (and debuted), it clearly never clicked with the public. Most people — even just only counting people who create and share edited videos to social media — probably have never even heard of Clips. There was something essential missing: a use case. Edits, Meta’s new-this-year video editing app for mobile, has a clear use case: it’s meant for editing videos destined for Meta’s popular social media networks. Clips had no clear target destination. It could have, but never did.

★ Monday, 13 October 2025