The iOS 18 feature backlog has got so bad it’s starting to affect iOS 19

Troubling news from inside Apple Park, where the engineering team is reportedly struggling to deal with the increasingly dire state of iOS 18 development.

The public version of iOS 18.0 launched back in September, but it did so without the inclusion of Apple Intelligence, the most highly anticipated new feature for this cycle. It’s debatable whether the company always planned to hold back Apple Intelligence until a later software update, but it seems unlikely, given that this meant the iPhone 16 launched without its flagship feature.

Apple Intelligence eventually arrived as part of the iOS 18.1 update at the end of October, but was still missing many of its features (including Image Playground, the heavily hyped generative AI illustration feature), not to mention support for any countries other than the U.S. England-language users in Australia, Canada, Ireland, South Africa, New Zealand, and the U.K. had to wait until iOS 18.2, which has just arrived, and Apple is set to carry on adding new AI features well into 2025.

iPhone owners in other countries who are keen to try out Apple Intelligence may be heartened by a seeming leak by Apple, which claims in the iOS 18.2 press release that the “initial set” of additional languages will arrive in April 2025. It’s not clear which will be first, but the company said it’s working on support for “Chinese, English (India), English (Singapore), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, and Vietnamese.”

Nevertheless, according to well-informed Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman, the iOS 18 rollout is not going according to plan. So much so that engineers who were supposed to be working on next year’s iOS 19 update have been told to pitch in with iOS 18 instead.

Gurman previously reported that Apple was working on a major upgrade for Siri in iOS 19, including the development of a of more advanced large language model. It’s not clear whether this delay will change the schedule for that release or if it was always planned for a mid-cycle launch like the “next-gen Siri” coming as part of iOS 18 in 2025.

That diversion of resources may help in the short term, but it’s storing up problems for the future. With the result that iOS 19, according to Gurman, will have a staggered rollout of features much like iOS 18, and features that might have been slated to appear in iOS 19.0 being pushed back to a later release.