In an announcement on its China newsroom on October 31, Apple said Apple Intelligence will come to China in December with the iOS 27.3 update. The features will reach Chinese users roughly two years after they launched in the US. In the version for the country, Alibaba's AI model Qwen will also be built into the iPhone.
What happened?
The first package includes live translation, writing tools, Clean Up (which removes unwanted objects from photos), Genmoji, highlighting of important emails and notification summaries. Qwen comes into play in three places: Siri, the writing tools and Visual Intelligence. Siri will be able to pass some questions that need broader knowledge on to Qwen. Users will be able to ask questions about a photo or a PDF and have the writing tools generate text from scratch. Using Qwen requires signing in with a Qwen account or with the Sign in with Apple option.
Developers will be able to test it with a beta release starting November 4. The features will work on iPhone 15 Pro and later models; the Siri and device language must be English or Simplified Chinese. According to The Next Web, China's internet regulator approved this setup in July. The revamped Siri that Apple unveiled at WWDC 2026 is not part of the first package. Support for other Apple devices will follow once the necessary approvals are in place.
Why does it matter?
China is one of Apple's biggest markets, and without AI features the company had been falling behind its domestic rivals there. Offering foreign AI models in China requires government approval, which is why Apple chose to work with a local partner. It marks a new era in which the same phone runs on a different AI depending on the country. We told the story of how long even a simple feature kept people waiting in the iPhone's early days in our article on copy and paste on the first iPhone.