Apple has quietly ended the life of Clips, its fun creativity tool for making videos on iPhone and iPad. The company has pulled Clips from the App Store and says it won’t ship future updates, bringing an end to a seven-year experiment in casual, social-style creation on Apple’s platform.
What Apple Is Changing After Retiring the Clips App
Clips is not available for new downloads, according to an Apple Support document. Current users can continue using the app on their current or earlier devices, and they can re-download it if necessary from their list of purchased apps. Read Apple’s warning about saving any Clips projects to the Photos library, as well: without future updates, features of the app “may no longer work.”
A Brief History of Clips, Apple’s Video Editor
Introduced in 2017, Clips served as Apple’s response to the explosion of mobile video largely taking over streams, as short-form posts would dominate. It never really aimed to be a social network. Instead, it represented a fast and approachable way to stitch video and photos together with filters, stickers, animated posters, music — and one very Apple-ish twist: Live Titles, which relied on on-device speech recognition to create real-time captions.
Over the years, Apple added some smart updates: support for vertical and landscape formats, HDR capture on iPhone models that supported it, AR Spaces effects that harnessed the LiDAR scanner to anchor graphics in real space. But the cadence slowed. As MacRumors noted, the most recent releases were mostly maintenance and bug-patch updates rather than introducing new creative features — a hint that the app was falling off Apple’s long-term vision.
Why Clips Fell Behind in the Social Video Era
The central contradiction at Clips was structural: the true gravity of modern video creation resides wherever audiences are. TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts folded the creation-to-publishing loop into their own platforms, favoring tools that plug directly into the feed and its algorithmic distribution. Working in a sandbox app and bringing your work into the world somewhere else is friction at exactly the moment when people want to move quickly as creators.
Apple had also slipped bite-sized creativity into system apps, blunting Clips’ edge. The Camera app picked up richer filters, the Messages app expanded effects and stickers, and Photos added powerful editing features — plus iMovie and, more recently, Final Cut Pro for iPad and the Final Cut Camera app have catered to more serious workflows. App intelligence firms not directly affiliated with the app stores have long indicated that Clips never broke into the top tier of the Photo & Video chart — indicating low sustained traction compared to creator-first tools from ByteDance, Meta, and Google.
The market has, meanwhile, shifted more toward AI-assisted and generative features. Competitors have since started offering auto-cutting, beat-matched edits, background removal, and text-to-video experiments. Against that backdrop, Clips — with its foundation in real-world footage combined with whimsical overlays (much unlike the odes to ’80s and ’90s music videos we’ve seen elsewhere from Apple) — began to feel more and more like a creative sandbox of an earlier time.
What Users Can Do Now to Preserve Their Clips Projects
If you have projects in Clips, export them to your Photos library. Apple says you can save with or without effects; if you want ultimate flexibility later, retain both a version with baked-in overlays and the original media. The app is not going to be maintained, so some features could break or display improperly in future iOS releases; therefore it’s wise to consider Clips read-only at this point.
For simple edits, Apple’s iMovie is still a good free option. On the iPad, Final Cut Pro provides pro-level control, and the Final Cut Camera app on iPhone dovetails neatly for accurate capture. Common third-party options are CapCut for template-driven social edits, LumaFusion for multi-track timelines on mobile, and Adobe Premiere Rush for cross-platform projects. And each carries a varying blend of automation, control, and privacy — think about where your footage will be processed and stored.
What This Means for Apple’s Media Apps and Strategy
Apple is known for trimming stand-alone apps when their features make more sense as system-level options or inside flagship titles. The deeper issue is that Music Memos was sunset and its ideas folded into Voice Memos and GarageBand, while iTunes U has been retired as Apple rethinks the way it works with education. Clips follows the same pattern: a good idea introduced to lay groundwork for features that would later be taken up elsewhere.
Going forward, plan on Apple continuing to stress its two extremes: effortless creation that’s baked into Camera, Photos, and Messages, and serious production through Final Cut on Mac and iPad. The middle ground that Clips occupied is now served more and more by platform-native tools, or maybe by the AI-forward editors that automate much of the busywork creators once had to do manually.
It never quite achieved that status, but Clips has long exerted a relatively quiet pull over how iPhone users caption, decorate, and share snippets of video. Its retreat is less of a reversal than a tidying up, one that leaves Apple free to pursue where users are actually creating and publishing today.