Apple Intelligence Is Coming to EU iPhones After All
Apple Intelligence launched worldwide in U.S. English yesterday, but if you’re an iPhone user in the E.U. or mainland China, I wouldn’t blame you for not knowing what all the hubbub is about. That’s because Apple’s AI is currently unavailable on phones or tablets in those regions—to use the new tech there, you'll need to do so on a Mac.
Apple previously blamed the E.U.’s DMA regulations for the restriction, saying releasing AI under its interoperability requirements “could force us to compromise the integrity of our products in ways that risk user privacy and data security.” But suddenly, the company’s tune has changed. It’s not quite clear why, but in an Irish Apple newsroom post, the iPhone maker now says “Apple Intelligence features will start to roll out to iPhone and iPad users in the E.U.” starting next April.
According to the post, the April release will include “many of the core features of Apple Intelligence, including Writing Tools, Genmoji, a redesigned Siri with richer language understanding, ChatGPT integration, and more.”
Whether Apple’s worked out a deal with the E.U. or whether the company is moving forward for some other reason isn’t clear, just as it wasn’t clear how much E.U. regulations were threatening Apple Intelligence in the first place. It’s possible the company could have released Apple Intelligence in Europe alongside the rest of the world and was simply holding back European AI out of an abundance of caution. Less generously, the withholding could've been intended as a way to apply pressure to the region. In the past, European regulators have insinuated that keeping Apple’s AI out of the E.U. was not entirely their decision, with a European commissioner calling Apple’s choice to halt Apple Intelligence’s European release a “stunning open declaration” of anticompetitive behavior.
I've reached out to both Apple and the E.U. for clarification and will update this article when I hear back. Still, when the feature does launch in the region, it does sound like it will be almost entirely on par with the U.S. release (I’ve also asked Apple to clarify which features EU phones will and won’t get, and will include that information in updates as well).
As noted, Europeans do already have access to the full suite of Apple AI features, but only on supported Mac devices. They’ll need to update to macOS Sequoia 15.1 and set their device’s language to U.S. English first (under Settings -> General -> Language & Region), but that’s not a unique issue. Apple promises to add support for various other English dialects in December, including for Ireland, the U.K., Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa. Indian and Singaporean English and other languages will come over the course of the next year, with Apple confirming various European and Asian languages, and promising still others.
(If Asian language support has you excited for a release in mainland China, where Apple Intelligence has yet to even reach the Mac, that is unfortunately still not on the docket.)