Apple officially entered the AI era this year with the debut of Apple Intelligence. However, 2024 also marked a year in which Apple’s staggered release schedule for feature updates was slower than usual. 2025 may not be very different.
According to Bloomberg, Apple has pushed an undefined number of features that were originally scheduled to arrive with the iOS 19 upgrade next year. Earlier this week, the source revealed that a planned Siri upgrade that would increase its conversational capabilities had been postponed until spring 2026.
“I’m told that a larger-than-usual number of features scheduled for iOS 19 (beyond the new Siri) are already postponed until spring 2026 (when iOS 19.4 debuts),” according to a Bloomberg article. The theme isn’t much different from what Apple has done so far with iOS 18.
Only weeks after the WWDC 2024 conference in June, it was revealed that the corporation had delayed several of the most exciting Siri and Apple Intelligence capabilities. Some of these capabilities, such as the anticipated interaction with third-party apps, have yet to come and are slated to be available publicly next year.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, a top Apple official hinted at the company’s cautious approach to introducing new capabilities in the Apple Intelligence stack.
“You could throw something out there and it would be a mess. Apple’s approach is more like, ‘Let’s try to get each piece right and deliver it when it’s ready,'” Craig Federighi, SVP of Software Engineering at Apple, told the site.
Now, Apple Intelligence hasn’t encountered the same issues as competitors such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Microsoft’s Copilot. Generative tools, such as those stated above, have their own set of intrinsic issues, such as hallucinations, making up false facts, and going crazy.
Digital Trends’ Joe Maring discovered that Google’s Pixel Studio program generated extremely troubling graphics, such as a Nazi-influenced SpongeBob.
This well-documented error-prone characteristic of Generative AI products may explain why Apple has been hesitant to fully integrate AI into its applications. Unsurprisingly, Apple Intelligence has primarily focused on low-stakes scenarios rather than chasing aspirational goalposts with a high-risk, high-reward caveat.
At the same time, Apple risks falling behind its competitors. Google and Microsoft have already integrated their own AI tools into popular products such as Workspace and Office 365, with occasional OS-level connections.
We’ll have to wait more than half a year to see what Apple has in store for iOS 19. Furthermore, several iOS 18 improvements that were unveiled months ago at Apple’s annual developers conference are still on track for public release.
Looking at the competition, Google is now preparing to unveil its own major advances in around the same timeframe as Apple. The business has already released the first Developer Preview of Android 16 and plans to achieve platform stability in the first half of the year.
That does not necessarily imply Google intends to spoil Apple’s flashy June event covering yearly software updates, according to the search giant. However, with Apple’s feature cadence reportedly experiencing delays, Google has an opportunity to surprise smartphone enthusiasts with new software tricks ahead of Apple.