Apple has confirmed that Apple Intelligence is coming to mainland China, with testing opening in the latest iOS developer beta on November 4 and a public launch planned with iOS 27.3 in December. The announcement, published on Apple’s China newsroom on October 31, 2026, ends a two-year wait for iPhone owners in mainland China, who watched the rest of the world get Apple’s AI features from iOS 18.1 onwards.

The China version runs on a local partnership: Alibaba’s Qwen model powers selected experiences, including Siri, Writing Tools and Visual Intelligence. Users sign in with a Qwen account or with Sign in with Apple, and can ask Qwen about photos and documents such as PDFs and presentations, or have it write original content through a Compose feature in Writing Tools. The first feature list is the familiar first-generation set — Live Translation in Messages, FaceTime and Phone, Writing Tools, Visual Intelligence, Clean Up in Photos, Genmoji, Mail and notification summaries and more — on iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, iPhone 16 and later, iPhone Air and iPhone Duo, with the device and Siri set to English or Simplified Chinese.

What is missing matters as much as what arrives. Apple says Siri AI and the other next-generation features announced at WWDC 2026 are not included in this first China release, and reporting adds that Image Playground, Apple’s image generator, is also absent. Support for other platforms, including iPad and Mac, is expected to follow after further approvals. For now, this is a staged, iPhone-only first wave — a real launch, but deliberately not the full Apple Intelligence roadmap.

Sources