iOS 26.4: The Long-Awaited ‘Siri 2.0’ Is Finally Just Around the Corner

While iOS point releases often bring new features, even the most groundbreaking entries of the past may pale in comparison to iOS 26.4 — and we could see the first developer betas arriving by the end of this month.

If you’ve been following the saga of Apple Intelligence and the so-called “Siri 2.0,” you’re already well aware that Apple made some big promises for Siri during its 2024 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) that it has yet to fulfill. In fact, it failed to deliver on what should have been a new Siri in iOS 18.4 last year, forcing it to make a rare retreat while it rethought and retooled things.

Broken Dreams

In early March, Apple made an official statement to Daring Fireball’s John Gruber admitting that “It’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year” — a timeframe that everybody took to mean sometime in iOS 26. As the months went on, it became clear that Apple was aiming for iOS 26.4, but like the original plan was to bake them into iOS 18.4.

Now, we’re on the cusp of the launch of iOS 26.4, and it looks like Apple will finally be able to deliver on its 2024 WWDC promise. However, it’s taken a surprisingly long road for it to get here. It turns out that building AI large language models is hard.

The past year has been fraught with major changes inside the walls of Apple Park that feel like echoes of the days when Steve Jobs castigated the MobileMe team following the disastrous launch of Apple’s cloud service in 2008. Apple brought in some of its heaviest hitters to right the listing Siri ship, and when that didn’t get enough traction, reassigned the entire department to Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior VP of software engineering, moving it out from John Giannandrea, Apple’s now-former senior VP of AI and machine learning, who quietly announced his retirement in December — although many believe he was actually shown the door after his failure to deliver on Siri.

Calling in the Big Guns

However, it seems even that wasn’t enough to get Siri back on track, and as Apple hemorrhaged AI talent to competitors, it was clear that it was going to need some outside help.

Not long after WWDC 2025, we began hearing rumors that Apple was looking to license the necessary LLMs from a third-party to give Siri a much-needed shot in the arm. Apple reportedly held a “bake-off” between several contenders, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, but when the dust settled Gemini had reportedly come out on top.

Still, things remained up in the air until last month, when Apple and Google announced a joint collaboration in which Google’s AI models would be used to power the new Siri.

As we’ve already discussed, this doesn’t mean that Siri will be “powered by Gemini.” Instead, the collaboration will see Apple using Google’s core models as the plumbing for its own Apple Foundation Models (AFM). This means Apple will still control the final results, and — for now at least — everything will run on Apple’s infrastructure.

Some of that could change by the time iOS 27 is released later this year, as Apple reportedly has even bigger plans to turn Siri into a full chatbot, but for now, iOS 26.4 will be strictly about delivering on the things Apple originally promised us for iOS 18.4.

What to Expect in iOS 26.4

Since it’s been nearly two years, we can’t blame you if you’ve forgotten what those are, so here’s a recap:

1. Personal Context: This is the most significant enhancement that Apple showed off at WWDC 24, as it has the potential to make Siri work more like a human assistant. Siri will be able to dig deep into your on-device data like emails, calendar appointments, messages, contacts, files, and more, to ferret out information relevant to your request. For example, you could ask Siri if you’ll be able to make it to a concert you’ve been invited to, and it will be able to find the PDF of the event notice in your email to get the time and location, check your calendar appointments to see when your last meeting of the day is, and then look at Apple Maps data to figure out travel times.
2. App Intents: Siri’s personalization features will only work for apps it knows how to read data from, so App Intents will provide the frameworks for third-party developers to plug their apps into the more powerful Siri. This part is key to making Siri work with more than just Mail, Calendar, Contacts, and Apple’s other first-party apps.
3. On-screen awareness: Siri will be able to analyze what’s on your screen using Apple Intelligence so it can handle requests with less interaction. For example, you can ask Siri to save contact information from a message or ask simple and intuitive questions like “What was the score last night?” when chatting with a friend about a recent game.
   

While the Siri improvements are expected to be the stars of the show, that’s not all that’s coming in iOS 26.4. We can also expect new emojis — par for the course for a .4 update — and probably a handful of other smaller tweaks such as expanded sports support in Apple TV and other apps and credit card autofill with third-party apps.

When to Expect iOS 26.4

Although we’re unlikely to see the public release of iOS 26.4 before April, several signs have pointed to the first iOS 26.4 developer beta arriving in the next couple of weeks — and there’s a good chance Apple will have some kind of reveal event to accompany it.

That’s because this is one of these areas where Apple will undoubtedly want to ensure it controls the narrative rather than letting us hear about it from pundits running the betas. Steve Jobs famously unveiled the original iPhone six months ahead of its release in 2007 because he wanted to the one to tell everyone about it rather than letting it get out via the inevitable FCC leaks.

This feels like the same scenario, but in this case it’s also as important for Apple to manage expectations by telling us what Siri isn’t (yet) as it is to promote what it is. Between the reports on Apple’s longer-term plans and the delays, many are expecting Apple to make a bigger splash in iOS 26.4, when in reality the first version will just be delivering on what was supposed to arrive a year ago.

Nobody is quite sure what form that event will take. Apple might just hold an invite-only “boutique” briefing like it often does for members of the press for smaller announcements. Recent reports suggest that Apple will announce the iPhone 17e on February 19, so there could be room for a combined event, but we wouldn’t hold our breath on that one. Anything’s possible, but the iPhone 17e won’t justify stage time on its own, so unless Apple plans to use it as an excuse to hold an event and toss in a couple of other products, it’s just as likely to slip that new iPhone out via press release and do something distinct to ensure the focus is on the new Siri.

Either way, we’ll probably start hearing about it soon. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, “Apple expects to deliver the first beta version of iOS 26.4 to developers the week of Feb. 23.” Any kind of event or briefing will probably be on the same day that first beta goes out, so we shouldn’t have to wait much longer to find out whether Apple’s promised Siri improvements pass muster.

[The information provided in this article has NOT been confirmed by Apple and may be speculation. Provided details may not be factual. Take all rumors, tech or otherwise, with a grain of salt.]