Why did Apple pre-announce “more personalised Siri”?

In this post, John Gruber discusses how Apple dropped the ball by pre-announcing a feature that doesn’t exist yet in any semblance of a demoable form. I refer of course to the new Smart Siri features that ostensibly exist under the Apple Intelligence branding. Gruber describes how announcing features that can’t even be demoed yet is something that pretty much never happened at Apple during the second coming of Steve Jobs years, and for good reason: that way, they never ended up with egg on their faces when things didn’t ship as planned.

The obvious reason why Apple might have pre-announced this feature is to head off accusations that the company was “behind” in AI. Gruber also makes the point that Apple Intelligence is the collective name for a whole set of disparate features; maybe without personalised Siri, the set of AI offerings looked too bare and sparse to be promoted. None of this I disagree with, but I suspect there is another reason too.

We know a lot about how personalised Siri will interact with apps, based on technical sessions from WWDC and new APIs that have shipped in iOS. What it won’t do is observe your screen, processing the images of the UI to extract meaning. Doing that would be a PR nightmare for a company that markets itself as privacy-conscious. And it’s also really hard to do well.

No, the smart Siri will need buy-in from developers. Devs will tell the system about nouns and verbs that their apps know about — the semantics of the app’s data model objects, and the actions users can take upon them. Additionally, using this structured data, apps will tell the system what the user is doing right now, thus providing the context that Siri can become aware of. It’s all built on top of the existing Intents and UserActivities that apps have already been using to integrate with Shortcuts, Spotlight, and a bunch of other bits of the system. But using those is optional, and even for an app that’s got a head start, the new supercharged versions will require extra work to adopt.

I suspect Apple was hoping that, by pre-announcing what’s coming, devs would rush to adopt these intents, so when smart Siri does ship, there’d be a bunch of apps ready for it. After all, if Apple shipped a user-facing feature that didn’t do anything yet because apps hadn’t adopted it, that wouldn’t be a good look either.

I don’t think that this was the entire reason for the pre-announcement, and nor do I think the pre-announcement was made with conscious knowledge that this delay would come. I see it more as something that might have tipped the balance slightly on an already contentious internal decision, and that it went hand in hand with a bit of naïve optimism about what could be accomplished in time.

What I haven’t touched on yet is developer sentiment towards Apple. Gone are the days where an eager group of independent developers would adopt every new technology springing forth from Cupertino, just because. Look at VisionOS — Apple promised the next big thing, but there’s no market for software there. (Jeff Johnson reports that in the first three weeks he only sold 21 copies of the Vision Pro version of his popular Safari extension StopTheMadness.) Beyond that, it is increasingly clear that Apple does things that benefit Apple, and many of those things do not benefit developers.

So, will the time and effort to support the new Intents be a benefit to third party devs? Or would it be wasted time that could otherwise have been used to make new features? Time will tell. But it certainly wouldn’t surprise me if Apple, insulated in their ivory tower, expected more buy-in than they’re getting.