- Apple has reportedly delayed some of Siri’s AI features beyond iOS 26.4
- These will apparently now land as part of iOS 26.5 or iOS 27
- These features were first announced back in June 2024
Siri’s long-promised AI overhaul is becoming a huge embarrassment for Apple, as while this was initially announced back in June of 2024, at which point Apple said it would launch as part of iOS 18 that year, we’re now in 2026 and it still hasn’t arrived. Not only that, but it’s reportedly now being delayed even further.
We’d heard that it might finally arrive – at least in part – with iOS 26.4, which is expected to roll out soon, but now Apple watcher Mark Gurman, writing for Bloomberg (via 9to5Mac), has said that at least some of the features that were previously planned for iOS 26.4 will now ship with iOS 26.5, which is expected in May, and iOS 27, due in September, instead.
Gurman – who has a superb track record for Apple information – cites “people familiar with the matter”, and adds that the most likely features to slip are “voice-based control of in-app actions”, and “the expanded ability for Siri to tap into personal data,” which, as Gurman explains, “would let users ask the assistant to, say, search old text messages to locate a podcast shared by a friend and immediately play it.”
So if this is correct, Siri’s AI overhaul won’t get most of its core features until around two years after it was first announced, and parts that don’t arrive until iOS 27 will be a full two years later than Apple initially said to expect them.
An unreasonably long wait
Even in isolation, this would be a ridiculously long delay, and one that’s not very fair on customers – including myself – who upgraded to iPhone 16-series phones in part down to the promise of these features.
But it gets even worse when you consider just how far ahead Android is when it comes to AI features, with Gemini having delivered much of what Apple is promising for Siri for years now.
In fact, Apple is so far behind that it seems to have – for the time being at least – essentially given up on trying to directly compete, and has instead inked a deal with Google to use Gemini as the brains behind Siri. But even with that deal in place, the wait goes on.
Apple is no stranger to embarrassments and failures, from ‘antennagate’ and ‘bendgate’ to the awful state Apple Maps launched in and the abandoned AirPower wireless charger, but none of these issues dragged on for quite as long as the current Siri debacle.
And not only is Siri miles behind the competition here, but even before AI emerged, Siri was generally considered less capable than rivals, so for whatever reason this is something Apple has struggled with in one way or another since the launch of Siri itself.
Hopefully, Siri will finally be competitive once this promised AI overhaul is delivered, but with the way things have been going so far, I wouldn’t be surprised if it gets even further delayed.
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