Apple Intelligence Not Working in Facebook and Instagram? Blame Meta
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If you’ve been wondering why you can’t access Apple Intelligence features like Writing Tools and Genmoji in WhatsApp or Instagram, you can stop scratching your head. It turns out this isn’t a bug but rather a deliberate move on Meta’s part to prevent access to these tools.
As much as Apple wants to promote its AI features as system-wide tools, it’s also not forcing them down anyone’s throat — and that includes third-party apps. Like many other iOS features, developers can choose which Apple Intelligence tools are available in their apps and can even opt to have none available.
That’s precisely what Meta’s done, according to the Brazilian site Sorcerhat Tech (via 9to5Mac). Author William Max noticed the problem following the release of iOS 18.4, which expanded Apple Intelligence into additional languages, including Brazilian Portuguese.
It’s unclear how recently this changed, as we’ve previously noticed the absence of these tools in apps like Messenger and Threads. However, whenever it happened, it’s clear that it’s a deliberate move on the part of Meta’s developers, as Apple Intelligence features work fine in most other apps — even those with their own AI tools, like X and Gmail, which both directly support Grok and Gemini, respectively. Google only blocks Writing Tools in a few perfectly reasonable places, such as its Gemini AI app.
While not all apps that support Writing Tools will show an Apple Intelligence icon in the toolbar — that seems to be limited to Apple’s first-party apps and a few others that have explicitly added it — third-party apps typically provide access to Writing Tools through the context menu that appears when selecting text. While developers have to opt into using the AI button in the toolbar, the Writing Tools menu is enabled by default for any app that uses the standard iOS text editing features (which nearly all do). Developers who don’t want it there must explicitly opt out of it.
Meta hasn’t officially said anything about Apple Intelligence being unavailable in its apps, but it likely wants to steer folks to its own Meta AI engine. The “Writing Tools” option in the text menu has been replaced in some of Meta’s apps with a “Write with AI” button that engages Meta AI instead of Apple Intelligence.
While all of Meta’s apps lack Writing Tools, the availability of Meta AI in that menu is much less consistent. So far, only Messenger has it, while Facebook, Threads, Instagram, and WhatsApp do not — although all five apps lack direct access to Writing Tools.
Genmoji is a bit more complicated, as it may merely be a side-effect of apps that don’t support stickers. Messenger and WhatsApp still show a Genmoji button when calling up the emoji keyboard, but these apps also support Apple’s stickers that can be used for Memoji and other custom stickers. Genmoji is essentially an extension of that, with custom emojis created as sticker-style graphics since true emojis are part of a pre-defined Unicode standard.
Instagram and Threads don’t have a Genmoji button, but they also don’t provide access to stickers, as you can only send standard characters and emoji in their text fields. Instagram once allowed Apple’s stickers to be used in stories, but it was disabled in a recent update.
This is also partly true for Facebook, which lacks stickers and Genmoji for creating new posts but allows them in comments. Our educated guess is that Meta hasn’t explicitly disabled Genmoji here, per se, but is simply restricting the ability to insert graphics into these text fields. iOS will respect how a text field is defined and only show a keyboard appropriate for that particular field.
There could also be some level of sour grapes here on Meta’s part. Last year, the WSJ reported that Apple had briefly considered integrating Meta’s Llama large language model into iOS 18 as part of Apple Intelligence. Such a deal would have likely seen Meta AI available as an extension to Apple Intelligence rather than a core feature, just as we’ve seen with ChatGPT in iOS 18. It’s unclear whether Apple was considering Meta instead of or in addition to ChatGPT, but Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that the discussions didn’t go very far due to the two company’s widely different approaches to user privacy.
Apple ended up going with OpenAI and ChatGPT, but it also made it clear from the start that this would just be the first of several partners. Although we’re not holding our breath that Meta AI will be on that list anytime soon, there’s been evidence that Gemini support could be coming next.
