Disturbing news coming from Apple Park, where the engineering team is reportedly struggling to cope with the increasingly dire state of iOS 18 development.
The public version of iOS 18.0 launched in September, but without the inclusion of Apple Intelligence, the most anticipated new feature of this cycle. It's debatable whether the company always planned to hold back Apple Intelligence until a later software update, but that seems unlikely, given that it meant the iPhone 16 launched without its flagship feature.
Apple Intelligence finally arrived as part of the iOS 18.1 update in late October, but it was still missing many of its features (including Image Playground, the much-hyped AI generative illustration feature), not to mention support for countries other than the United States. English-speaking users in Australia, Canada, Ireland, South Africa, New Zealand and the United Kingdom had to wait for iOS 18.2, which just arrived, and Apple is expected to continue adding new features of AI until 2025.
iPhone owners in other countries eager to try Apple Intelligence may be encouraged by an apparent leak from Apple, which claims in the iOS 18.2 press release that the “initial set” of additional languages will arrive in April 2025. is not clear which ones. will be the first, but the company said it is working on supporting “Chinese, English (India), English (Singapore), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, and Vietnamese.”
However, according to knowledgeable Bloomberg journalist Mark Gurman, the iOS 18 rollout is not going as planned. So much so that engineers who were supposed to be working on next year's iOS 19 update were asked to jump into iOS 18 instead. “causing delays in some features planned for iOS 19.”
Gurman previously reported that Apple was working on a major upgrade to Siri in iOS 19, including the development of a more advanced language model. It's unclear if this delay will change the timeline for this release or if it was always intended for a mid-cycle launch like the “next-gen Siri” that will be part of iOS 18 in 2025.
This diversion of resources may help in the short term, but it creates problems for the future. The result is that iOS 19, according to Gurman, will benefit from a staggered rollout of features similar to those in iOS 18, and that features that might have appeared in iOS 19.0 will be pushed to a later version.
