iOS 27 and the new Siri: what app owners should do

A year ago, a week after iOS 26 came out, we wrote that Apple had put a small, free, private AI model inside every compatible iPhone app. Our advice was to try it for small English-language features, and to wait if your users mostly write in Arabic or Hindi.

iOS 27 arrived on 14 September, with the new Siri launching as a beta. It is a bigger step than last year's, and it changes the question for app owners from "should we add a small AI feature?" to "can Siri use our app?"

The new Siri

Apple announced at WWDC in June that Siri had been rebuilt on new models, developed with Google's Gemini technology and running on the device and on Apple's Private Cloud Compute servers. The new Siri understands ordinary speech much better, holds a conversation, and, most importantly for app owners, can find content inside apps and take actions in them.

It also has limits worth knowing. At launch, the new Siri works in English only, with French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish promised from October. Arabic and Hindi are not on that list. The advanced Siri features need an iPhone 15 Pro or newer. Apple has said there will be daily usage limits, with paid expanded access to come. And Apple is not offering the new Siri on iPhones and iPads in the EU for now.

How apps connect to Siri

Siri reaches your app through App Intents, the framework Apple has been building out for several years. In iOS 27 there are two parts that matter most.

Entity schemas describe the things in your app, such as orders, bookings, courses, properties or invoices, so they can be added to the phone's search index and Siri can surface them, credited to your app. Intent schemas describe the actions people can take on those things, such as rebooking an appointment, reordering, tracking a delivery or checking a balance. Apple says these schemas keep working as Siri's language understanding improves and expands to new languages and dialects, with no code changes needed.

So a customer could say "move my dentist appointment to Thursday afternoon" or "what did I order from the pharmacy last time?" and Siri can answer from your app, or act in it, without the customer opening it and tapping through screens.

The AI framework opened up

The second change is quieter but important for developers. Apple's Foundation Models framework, which last year only ran Apple's small on-device model, now works with any language model: Apple's own, cloud models such as Claude and Gemini, or any other provider that follows Apple's model protocol. The same code can use a small model on the phone for quick jobs and a large cloud model for harder ones.

Apps can now send images with text, so a model can read a receipt or a label using on-device tools for text recognition and barcodes. Apple also added an Evaluations framework for testing whether AI features behave correctly, beyond what ordinary unit tests can catch.

There is a notable offer for smaller developers. If you are in the App Store Small Business Program and your app has fewer than two million first-time downloads, you can use Apple's next-generation model on Private Cloud Compute at no cloud API cost.

What we would do now

If you have an iPhone app with English-speaking users, the most valuable work this quarter is making it available to Siri.

1. List the three to five things your users come to the app for most often. Those are your intents.
2. List the things those actions apply to, such as bookings, orders or accounts. Those are your entities.
3. Implement them with App Intents schemas, and use Apple's App Intents testing tools to check them.
4. Keep anything involving money or irreversible changes behind a confirmation inside your app.

If your app already uses a cloud AI model, look at whether the opened-up framework simplifies your code, and whether some jobs can move to the on-device or Private Cloud Compute model to cut costs.

For apps in the Gulf and India

The language gap we described a year ago has narrowed less than we hoped. For users who set their iPhones to Arabic or Hindi, the new Siri is not available yet, and Apple has not given a date.

That does not mean waiting. Building intents and entities now costs the same as building them later, and Apple says they will keep working as Siri adds languages, without code changes. Many of your users in Dubai or Bengaluru also run their phones in English. When Siri does arrive in Arabic and Hindi, apps that are already connected will be ready on day one.