Apple’s Image Playground and Genmoji features reportedly on track for iOS 18.2 beta

In the latest edition of the Power On newsletter, Mark Gurman reported that Apple is going to begin releasing their image generation features in iOS 18.2 later this year. If history is to be followed, we should see the first beta ship in October.

The release timeframe for Apple’s image generation features was a bit up in the air, as the company didn’t include Genmoji nor Image Playground in the any of the existing iOS 18.1 betas. This led many to speculate on why the image generation features were seemingly delayed, and many were wondering if we’d even see the features ship this year. However, we now have an answer.

According to Gurman, the feature set will begin shipping in iOS 18.2, including both the new Image Playground app and Genmoji. This is another big step forward for the Apple Intelligence rollout, although the all new Siri with personal context is still expected to ship in iOS 18.4 in next spring.

Image Playground is a new Apple app, which will be able to generate all sorts of images based on brief prompts. There are three styles: Animation, Illustration, and Sketch. Notably, Image Playground doesn’t support photorealistic generation, likely for the better. You can learn more about Image Playground here.

Apple unveiled their Apple Intelligence feature set at WWDC24 back in June, although the features weren’t available in the initial iOS 18.0 betas. In late July, we got reports that the feature set would be delayed until iOS 18.1 in October, and the first iOS 18.1 beta released promptly after that, where we got our hands on Writing Tools, Notification Summaries, and more.

Are you excited for Image Playground or Genmoji? Let us know in the comments.