Apple finally shipped its long awaited personalized Siri with iOS 27. The company lived up to its promises, and delivered on its hefty goals that it set out back in 2024.
That said, Siri still lacks in terms of proactively taking actions for you, a feature that many AI companies are actively working towards. Apple might come around on that next year, per Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. The company is also experimenting with a new engineering pipeline that might make faster development possible.
In recent months, companies like Meta and SpaceXSI have gone all-in on new agentic AI interfaces that can carry out tasks for you. Muse and Grok Bot are agents that have their own virtual machines and can proactively handle tasks in the background for you, then deliver results.
Apple has a lot of potential to deliver in this space, especially given all of the frameworks they’ve built up over the years, like App Intents. With Apple, you hypothetically wouldn’t need to depend on as much computer-use ability, making certain tasks a lot less expensive.
According to Mark Gurman in his Power On newsletter, Apple could debut its own proactive version of Siri as soon as next year:
Dots, Muse and Grok can keep track of goals, determine what needs to happen next and continue pursuing objectives without the user initiating every individual step. Apple ultimately wants to go in this direction, I’m told, and I believe the company could make Siri more like an agent as early as next year — not that it has much of a choice, given current consumer and market demands.
It remains to be seen what Apple will ultimately ship here, but with the right execution, Apple certainly has high potential to compete in this space.
Apple improving internal development processes for iOS 28
A major part of better execution is having a better process. According to Gurman, Apple is also giving engineers more time to code and explore, rather than spend as much time integrating features within the operating system.
Typically, each of these stages is four weeks. With the first cycle of iOS 28 development, Apple is allotting 6 weeks to coding and 2 weeks to integration. This change was likely driven by the massive advances in agentic coding tools in the past couple years:
For this cycle, though, Apple has done things differently for the M1 milestone. Instead of the normal split between two four-week efforts, Apple engineers were tasked with six weeks of coding, exploration and feature development, and then only two weeks of convergence. Employees say they like the change, indicating that it creates more time for coming up with ideas and exploring them before needing to lock things in.
My favorite Apple accessory recommendations:
Follow Michael: X/Twitter, Bluesky, Instagram
You’re reading 9to5Mac — experts who break news about Apple and its surrounding ecosystem, day after day. Be sure to check out our homepage for all the latest news, and follow 9to5Mac on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay in the loop. Don’t know where to start? Check out our exclusive stories, reviews, how-tos, and subscribe to our YouTube channel
