Mike Wuerthele
It's been widely reported that Apple's Siri advancements promised for 2025 would arrive in April with iOS 18.4 but a new report casts some doubt on that timeline.
Apple has yet to officially announce when the advancements were coming, beyond a 2025 timeframe. The features were announced at WWDC 2024 and were said to be coming to iOS 18.
But, according to a new report by Bloomberg on Friday, Apple's work has hit some snags. Some features that were said to be planned for iOS 18.4 are said to have been pushed back to May, or even later.
Reportedly, testing of the improvements internally aren't going well. The features may be technically included in iOS 18.5, but disabled until Apple throws the switch to turn them on at some point after release.
That means features like Personal Context Understanding, In-App Actions, and Onscreen Awareness will wait to launch.
After the improvements, Siri will gain the ability to better interpret commands, and take multiple steps. So after asking about a sports team, a user can just say "when do they play next?" and then have Siri add that event to their calendar.
This aspect of the improvement round leans on app intents. This is the ability of developers to present users with specific features of their apps, to be used directly by Siri.
More improvements for Siri and Apple Intelligence are expected to be announced for iOS 19 at WWDC 2025 in early June.
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17 Comments
I am shocked... SHOCKED, I say! Who woulda thunk that after 15 years of Siri idiocy under Apple, Apple wasn't going to be able to fix it in 10 months? The WWDC announcement last year always seemed suspect--it was like we were being told that Siri, essentially held back in about third grade for the past decade and a half, was suddenly going to have a PhD by next April. Sounds like maybe not.
I’ve said it several times on this forum that I find the rollout of such a massive change for iOS 18.4 to be highly implausible. The QA alone is a massive undertaking. This system hooks in several areas of the operating system and has several region specific requirements. Even with a localized rollout it’s just nuts to expect this at 18.4.
What’s worse is that they marketed the iPhone 16 with a bunch of these unreleased features. It makes the 16 feel like a waste of money.