While 'iOS 26' Will Ship in 2025, 'Siri 26' Will Ship in 2026
Mark Gurman
In a troubling continuation of their weasel-wording, Apple kept saying at WWDC this year that the new Siri features – you know, the ones promised last year, but that never shipped – are going to be available in the "coming year". That, of course, suggests anytime between now and a year from now. And that, of course, suggests that the features are close. Perhaps really close.
It was just a minor delay and nothing more, after all.
Of course, when you push them, as many rightfully did after last year's debacle, they're admitting that "coming" is really a slippery placeholder for another word: "next". As in, these features are coming in 2026. Next year.
Apple Inc. has set an internal release target of spring 2026 for its delayed upgrade of Siri, marking a key step in its artificial intelligence turnaround effort.
The company’s Siri team is aiming to bring the revamped voice assistant to market as part of an iOS 26.4 software update, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The long-promised changes will allow Siri to tap into consumers’ personal data and on-screen activities in order to better fulfill queries.
Apple’s “.4” updates — known as “E” on the company’s internal software development schedule — are typically released in March. That was the case with iOS 18.4 this year and iOS 17.4 in 2024. But an exact date hasn’t been set internally for the software, beyond a spring time frame, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the work is private.
March 2026, if they hit that, will likely be closer to WWDC 2026 than it is to 2025. Which is to say, the next developer event a year from now. So yeah, "coming year" may be technically accurate, but it's also purposefully vague. Not to give Apple wiggle room on the hopes of a 2025 launch, but to let some people think these marquee features will be here any day now and maybe Apple really isn't behind in AI.
On the upside, that timetable would potentially allow them to highlight the features (again) at the iPhone unveil in the early fall. Ideally, they'll be real and really working this time. We'll see, we're not that far away from that event already.
If the latest release timing sticks, Apple will have gone nearly two years between announcing the new Siri and delivering it to customers. It’s been an especially high-profile delay because the capabilities were part of the iPhone 16 marketing last year — despite the new Siri not being close to ready.
Internally, Apple’s AI and marketing teams have pointed fingers at each other. The engineering side has blamed marketing for overhyping features, while marketing maintains it operated on timelines provided to them by the company’s AI teams, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
But guys, this is all in our heads. Everything is fine with Apple and AI! Minor delay, that's all. Internally, things have never been better, per Greg Joswiak, the head of one of the warring factions, per the above.
There also remains a debate over how much AI functionality Apple should be building itself and how much it should push off to partners like OpenAI. And the company has held internal discussions about buying smaller AI-related startups.
This was one of the under-covered aspects of WWDC this year – buried under 'Liquid Glass' as it were – but Apple did expand the partnership with OpenAI quite a bit to cover a number of new features. I'm still of the mindset that they should outsource basically all of Siri, or at least all the "world knowledge" stuff until the new Siri is ready to roll.
A key technical challenge: Siri’s brain was essentially split in half for iOS 18. Apple used an existing system for common tasks, such as setting timers and making calls, and a newer-generation platform for upgraded Siri features. Combining the two architectures led to bugs, necessitating Siri to be rebuilt entirely.
The issues set off a firestorm within Apple, leading to the company’s senior vice president of AI, John Giannandrea, being stripped of all consumer-facing product oversight. That included his management of Siri and Apple’s secretive robotics unit.
Yeah, this is exactly what I suspected had happened. Because it sounds like it was a similar situation to what happened to Amazon in trying to refresh Alexa last year – legacy technology of previous "successes" were holding them back, whereas the newer AI companies could start from scratch. Eventually, Amazon and Apple realized they needed to also start from scratch, only after wasting months on trying to make it all work together first.
Meanwhile, all was quiet on the "JG" front this year at WWDC it seemed (versus last year). Which also obviously makes sense. It's still sort of surprising he has stuck around post fall-out, but if he can now be back behind-the-scenes focused on the underlying technology and not the forward-facing products necessarily, that could be the right fit going forward.
One more thing:
For further in the future, the company has been working on an even more ambitious Siri revamp. This would turn the assistant into an always-on device copilot that’s more conversational. Apple also has teams exploring a chatbot-like app dubbed Knowledge that can tap into the open web.
The chatbot project is being led by Robby Walker. He previously ran the team developing Siri, until it was removed from his responsibilities during the shake-up earlier this year. That has spurred concerns within the company over whether his team is up to the latest challenge, Bloomberg has reported.
I feel like one thing lost in all of this is the fact that what we're talking about with this Siri revamp, at least as it relates to the features demoed on stage last year that failed to ship, is not a new fully "conversational" Siri – that's coming later! – this is just some new personalized capabilities for Siri. The conversational Siri, which would match not only what OpenAI and Google have offered for a while now, but also what Alexa+ is slowly rolling out, might be more of a 2027 thing. Which is wild.
Then again, that's sort of a "chatbot" thing. And as Craig Federighi and Joz made clear this week in many interviews (with seemingly anyone and everyone who asked except for John Gruber), they never intended to ship a silly, trivial chatbot. Except for, you know, the internal project working on just that. And also the new Siri, one day.
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler