Apple opens Siri AI to every app developer

If your app lives on an iPhone, you have a new front door to build.

Apple announced on November 3 that any developer can now connect an app to Siri AI, starting with the iOS 27.3, iPadOS 27.3, macOS 27.3 and visionOS 27.3 betas. Apps bring their content and actions into Siri AI through App Intents, the framework Apple already uses to expose what an app can do.

Siri can now run your app's actions

Apple says people can ask in their own words and Siri AI will carry out a custom action a developer has built. Its examples are checking a delivery, booking a reservation and placing an order.

For bigger requests, Apple is adding what it calls skills: a way to teach Siri AI to combine several actions into one experience.

Siri AI can also now surface any entity in the Spotlight semantic index, Apple says, not only the ones that fit an existing schema.

Apple says it has started rolling these capabilities out across many of its own apps, including Calendar, Mail, Maps, Messages, Notes, Photos, Reminders and Safari. Its examples: finding a coffee shop you visited last week, or archiving files nobody has opened in over a year.

The timeline is your head start

The dates matter more than the demo.

Apple calls this early access "before first shipping to customers in a few months," and says App Store submission opens in the spring. Until then it lives in the betas.

That gap is your window. The apps with a solid integration on day one are the apps Siri can reach when someone asks. The rest get opened by hand, or not at all.

Yes, Siri has let you down before. That is fair. The difference this time is where the work happens: the request lands in actions you define, so the quality of the result is partly in your hands.

This is tool use at the operating system level. The model picks the action, your code does the work. If you have built tools for an AI agent, the shape will feel familiar.

Read the footnotes before you plan a launch

The limits are real.

Siri AI is currently unavailable in the EU on iOS, iPadOS and watchOS, according to Apple, which says it is "working constructively with the EU in an attempt to find a path forward." It is not available to users under 13.

It needs an Apple Intelligence device set to a supported language. Today that is English, French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese or Spanish, with Traditional Chinese, Norwegian, Turkish and Vietnamese coming soon.

Apple also says Siri AI and other features that rely on server-side models are subject to daily usage limits, and that "expanded access to such features will be available for a fee in the future." Your users may hit a cap that has nothing to do with your app.

And the commercial rules are not written yet. Apple says it "will follow up with more details about the terms and usage policies for experiences enabled through Siri AI."

What to build this month

Start with what people already want from your app without opening it. Status checks. Reorders. Bookings. Whatever your support inbox asks about most.

Those are the first intents worth exposing, and the easiest to test.

Apple's developer documentation covers the new APIs and how to evaluate your app's experience with Siri AI, according to Apple. Apple engineers are also running Apple Intelligence Group Labs on November 4 and 5 for developer questions.

If your users are adults outside the EU, there is little reason to wait for spring.

Two blanks to watch

How big this gets depends on two things Apple has not published: the terms for Siri AI experiences, and the price of expanded access.

Watch the terms. Ship before the spring rush.