CUPERTINO, Calif. - Apple will begin testing its first Apple Intelligence features in China on November 4, 2026, with a public release in December alongside iOS 27.3, the company announced October 31, 2026, in a release on its China newsroom.
The rollout is iPhone only at first. Support for other Apple platforms will follow once the company receives the necessary approvals, Apple says. The first features will run on the iPhone 16 and later models, the iPhone Duo, the iPhone 15 Pro, the iPhone 15 Pro Max, and the iPhone Air, with both Siri and the device language set to English or Simplified Chinese.
Apple has partnered with Alibaba so users in China can use Alibaba’s Qwen model directly in Siri, Writing Tools, and Visual Intelligence, including for text and image understanding. Users can ask Qwen about photos and about documents, including PDFs and presentations, and a Compose option in Writing Tools lets Qwen write original content from scratch. Users sign in with a Qwen account or with Sign in with Apple.
The first feature set includes live translation in Messages, FaceTime, and Phone calls, including in-person translation through supported AirPods; Writing Tools for rewriting, proofreading, and summarizing; Visual Intelligence, which identifies what the camera sees; Clean Up in Photos; Genmoji; natural-language photo search; Memories movies in Photos; Priority Mail and Mail summaries; Smart Reply; notification summaries and priority notifications; a Reduce Interruptions focus mode; audio transcription summaries in Notes; and summaries of call transcripts. Siri also gains Type to Siri, letting users type to Siri and hold a conversation in context.
What the update does not include is just as specific. Apple says this update does not include Siri AI or the other next-generation Apple Intelligence features announced at WWDC 2026. Those features remain unavailable in China in this release.
The announcement covers users in China only. It makes no announcement about users elsewhere, and it gives no exact December day for the public release beyond the iOS 27.3 launch window.
(Source: Apple China Newsroom press release, October 31, 2026)
