When will we get Apple Intelligence? Maybe not until iOS 18.1

After unveiling Apple Intelligence at WWDC back in June, many have wondered when we’ll actually get to test out these new features. After all, we are quickly approaching August, and there’s still no Apple Intelligence features in any betas. Unfortunately, it’s looking like we might not get anything until iOS 18.1 later in the year.

Apple removes “this summer” terminology from Developer website

Shortly after WWDC, Apple created a landing page for Apple Intelligence on their developer website. On Monday, June 10th, the page stated the following:

Apple Intelligence will be available in an upcoming beta this summer. Get started with documentation, videos, and forums.

After checking the Wayback Machine, we discovered that the phrase “this summer” was removed by Thursday, June 13th. It could mean nothing, or it could possibly be an indicator that Apple no longer felt comfortable sticking to that claim.

Potential beta 3 scrap

With iOS 18 beta 3, some signs of Apple Intelligence started to emerge, but nothing that users could actually try out.

Spotted by our friends at MacRumors, Apple added a new section titled “Apple Intelligence & Siri” in the Settings app on the Xcode simulator for iOS 18 beta 3. This section only showed up in the Xcode simulator, and was removed from the build that shipped to testers. This could indicate that Apple was gearing up to ship some Apple Intelligence features in beta 3, like many users speculated, but later postponed those plans.

Apple also introduced a new emoji keyboard design in iOS 18 beta 3. This new emoji keyboard showed emojis in a bigger style, and included 4 rows of emojis rather than 5. After introducing this new emoji keyboard, some users reported briefly seeing a “Create New Emoji” button when going into the emoji picker. Needless to say, Apple fully removed this new emoji keyboard from the revision of iOS 18 beta 3.

Everything is gone in beta 4

After Apple released iOS 18 beta 4 last week, 9to5Mac‘s Filipe Espósito did a deep dive into the code changes within beta 4, and spotted that a large number of Apple Intelligence features had been internally removed. Additionally, the Image Playground app was fully removed from the build, when previously it was just a hidden app.

It’s possible that Apple removed all of these things from beta 4 because they’ve internally decided to move away from releasing Apple Intelligence features in iOS 18.0. Otherwise, they likely would’ve just kept the features there, and leave them inaccessible to users.

Why iOS 18.1?

It might seem like a random thought, but there is actually some precedent to back it up. Back when Apple was developing Stage Manager with iPadOS 16, they actually ended up fully delaying Stage Manager to iPadOS 16.1, and released the first beta of iPadOS 16.1 in late August – prior to any full release of iPadOS 16.0.

We could potentially see a similar situation with Apple Intelligence, where compatible devices can choose to opt into iOS 18.1 beta early, whereas unsupported devices continue to get normal iOS 18.0 betas.

Wrap Up

Ultimately, it’s still possible that we end up getting Apple Intelligence in an iOS 18.0 beta in the coming weeks. However, given the fact that signs of Apple Intelligence have only been dwindling in the past month, I think it’s reasonable to adjust our expectations.