At WWDC last summer, Apple showed off some advanced Siri features as part of Apple Intelligence that were supposed to come in an update to iOS 18 this spring. Apple even ran TV ads promoting iPhone 16 that showcased those features. Then, this spring, Apple delayed the release of those features and said they would be delivered “in the coming year.”
Now we have confirmation that this does not mean later in 2025. The new Siri features won’t be a part of iOS 26, or a 26.1 or 26.2 update. As a reminder, there are three major Siri features that were supposed to be here by now but missed the iOS 18 deadline:
Screen awareness: Siri can read what’s on your screen and take proper contextual action. When looking at a screen with an address on it, asking Siri to “Add this to my contacts” will know what you’re talking about, for example.
Personal context: Siri will use your mail, messages, web history, etc to build a contextual profile of you. (No data leaves your iPhone, it’s private.) So when you ask it for info, it can give you answers that are specific to you and your life.
In-app actions: A massive expansion of “app intents” will let developers build apps so that Siri can perform actions within them. “Make this photo black and white and send it to my wife” should be able to perform the necessary actions in Photos and Messages without your intervention. Hundreds of App Intents would let Siri do all sorts of things within both Apple’s apps and third-party apps.
In a WWDC interview with Mark Spoonauer from Tom’s Guide and Lance Ulanoff from Tech Radar, Apple’s software engineering head Craig Federighi and marketing chief Greg “Joz” Joswiak explained what happened and what we can expect. As Federighi explains it, those announced features were being built on the “V1” Siri architecture, and were working, but not well enough. And to meet the quality bar, those features need to be built upon the newer Siri “V2” architecture.
Apple has these features and more working, in-house, using the new V2 architecture but will no announce a date for when we can expect them until it has reached the quality level it thinks its customers expect.
When pressed by Spoonauer, who asked, “Instead of an actual release date, is it okay to say 2026, or is that too broad?” Joz answered, “Yeah, that’s what we said.” Federighi then went on to explain how the “V2” architecture being used in a homogeneous fashion across all of Siri gives Apple “much higher quality and much better capability.”
Of course, 2026 is still half a year away, and we don’t know when in 2026 we can expect any of this stuff. Apple could release the big V2 Siri update as an update to the version 26 OSes in the spring, perhaps with iOS/macOS/iPadOS 26.4 or the like. But it could also come in iOS 27 in the fall of 2026, or even as an update to that.
No matter how you look at it, if you want a new and improved Siri, you’re going to be waiting a while. And you probably shouldn’t expect Apple to announce a date or give a demo until it’s ready to launch.
