App Transfer and Siri Shortcuts Intents backwards compatibility

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Created Mar ’25

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Hi, I am currently working on an App Transfer from Company A to Company B but can't find any documentation about what happens to existing Siri Shortcuts working via App Extension intents. I have separated the rest of the post in 2 sections: one what summarizes my current understanding and the other with some questions and hypotheses. It would be great to have either someone from Apple to answer that, or someone else share their experience and possibly some documentation that I might have missed.

To my understanding, when a new Shortcut is created, it stores the BundleID of the App and of the App Extension to find the application that will execute it afterwards. If I uninstall the App, I can see a message in the Shortcut app that says "This action requires APPNAME but it may not be installed", but I know that after transferring the app the BundleID doesn't change completely, only the team part does. However, it is not possible to test that as this change cannot be done in xCode as far as I know. Another part that seems to play a role here is the info.plist file, but in my situation, there are no entries related to the BundleID.

All that being said, I am wondering:

Is it possible to perform an app transfer and keep previously created shortcuts working? Is it possible to test this kind of things without having to perform a transfer? I haven't found a way to change the team part of the Bundle ID Is there a place in the documentation that takes care of those things in depth?

Answer 1

Michael Coding Monkey OP

5d

We did this transfer in March: iOS app and native Mac app, different bundle IDs, same intents, both moved to a new team. App Intents, not an Intents extension.

A shortcut stores per action an AppIntentDescriptor with BundleIdentifier, AppIntentIdentifier, Name and TeamIdentifier. Shortcuts created before the transfer still carry the old TeamIdentifier.

To see it: share the shortcut as an iCloud link and download the shortcut field from https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/api/records/<id>. Same platform: shortcuts from before the transfer kept working. Resolution goes by the bundle identifier, which does not change.

Cross-platform: Shortcuts maps an action to the app on the other platform by intent name, but only within the same team (WWDC21 “Meet Shortcuts for macOS”). Shortcuts from before the transfer fail on the other platform with a missing action; the user has to rebuild them.

Testing without a transfer is not possible, since one explicit App ID cannot be signed by two teams.