Apple plans to launch Apple Intelligence in mainland China in December with iOS 27.3, two years after the US, excluding the rebuilt Siri AI. Siri AI is also still missing in the EU, with no indication of when approval might come.
Apple will ship Apple Intelligence in mainland China in December, two years after America got it. The version Europe is still waiting for is not in it.
The launch comes with an iOS 27.3 update and excludes the rebuilt Siri AI, Bloomberg reported, citing people with knowledge of the plans.
What ships is the 2024 set. Genmoji, notification summaries, writing tools and removing objects from photos, the features widely panned at the time for not working properly.
What does not ship is this year’s work. That means the rebuilt Siri, photo expansion, upgraded Genmoji and visual intelligence in the camera, and executives are not optimistic about Siri AI arriving there soon.
Getting this far took concessions. Apple trained its own model for China with Alibaba’s help, becoming the first foreign company Beijing has approved to offer a proprietary AI model in the mainland.
The guardrails were built with Alibaba and include a filter that lets the government approve ongoing updates to the models. Baidu handles search and some Siri features.
Image generation is out. Apple’s Image Playground will not ship there, and some text generation will be limited in some apps, to comply with the rules.
Approval came slowly. The Cyberspace Administration logged the service in July, about 22 months after Apple Intelligence launched elsewhere, and permits covering recent iPhones followed on 29 September.
It nearly went out early. Apple Intelligence briefly appeared in mainland settings in March, before approval, and was pulled.
Tim Cook, now Apple’s executive chairman rather than its chief executive, attended a White House state dinner for Xi Jinping last month.
Europe is the other hard market, and the obstacle there is different. Most of this year’s features cleared on schedule in September, but Siri AI is still missing from iPhones, iPads and Apple Watches in the EU.
Nobody will say when. People with knowledge of the matter say it is unclear whether or when Apple will get approval for a local release.
The two delays are not the same. In China Apple negotiated terms and got a date, while in Europe its talks with Brussels have produced a date for nothing.