Apple rebuilds Siri on a custom Google Gemini model

incrementalDeveloperPlatform Strategy

Monday, June 8, 2026

Signal

High

Time horizon

This week

Risk

Platform dependency on a direct competitor

The News

At WWDC 2026 today, Apple unveiled a rebuilt Siri whose cloud intelligence runs on a custom Google Gemini model. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports Apple will pay Google roughly $1 billion per year for a custom, roughly 1.2-trillion-parameter Gemini model to power Siri's cloud features, alongside Apple's own on-device models. Siri now uses a three-tier routing system: simple tasks stay on the device using Apple's own models, moderately complex requests go to Apple's Private Cloud Compute servers, and the heaviest reasoning tasks route to Google Cloud running on Nvidia Blackwell B200 GPUs, with Apple anonymizing and tokenizing queries so neither Apple staff nor Google can link requests to individual users. Apple also issued a formal SiriKit deprecation notice giving iOS and macOS developers two to three years to migrate to App Intents, now the only framework through which Siri can call into a third-party app.

The Read

Don't call this Apple's AI moment — call it Apple's Intel moment. For the first time, Apple has outsourced the cognitive core of a flagship product to a direct competitor because it could not build the equivalent in-house on the timeline its customers demanded. The interesting decision isn't the Gemini deal; it's the SiriKit deprecation. Apple is using the assistant rebuild as cover to force every meaningful iOS integration through App Intents, a Swift-native framework Apple fully controls — which means the dependency on Google is at the model layer, but the developer dependency on Apple just got stronger, not weaker. Cook first promised a context-aware, personally intelligent Siri at WWDC 2024 and failed to ship those features for nearly two years, leading to a $250 million settlement covering eligible iPhone 15 Pro and 16 purchases — today's keynote is the legal record being closed out, not opened. The rating is INCREMENTAL because the technology underneath is Google's, and the strategy on top is two years late.

Do This Week

Engineering teams shipping iOS apps need to start the App Intents migration this sprint, not next quarter.

Inventory every SiriKit intent in your iOS codebase and tag each as "migrate," "deprecate," or "rebuild"
Add streaming and multi-turn dialogue support to your top three App Intents — required for full Gemini-Siri integration
Re-baseline your assistant testing against a Gemini-routed Siri, not the iOS 26 Siri your QA still mocks

For Developer

Engineering teams shipping iOS apps need to start the App Intents migration this sprint, not next quarter.

Inventory every SiriKit intent in your iOS codebase and tag each as "migrate," "deprecate," or "rebuild"
Add streaming and multi-turn dialogue support to your top three App Intents — required for full Gemini-Siri integration
Re-baseline your assistant testing against a Gemini-routed Siri, not the iOS 26 Siri your QA still mocks

For Developer