For years, Apple has sold privacy as the thing that sets its own platform apart from all the others – and of all things, the privacy-marketed AI highlight of the year is missing in the EU on iPhone and iPad. On Mac, Apple Watch and Apple Vision Pro the new Siri is available, just not on the two most-used devices. This gap has a clear mechanism, and it has more to do with the reach of the DMA than with a whim in Cupertino.
A palpable sense of frustration has built up in the German-speaking Apple community after the keynote: another big stage, more glossy slides – and for EU users, once again a waiting room when it comes to the most important feature. The fact that the new Siri won't launch on iPhone and iPad in the EU for the time being, even though Mac, Apple Watch and Apple Vision Pro do get it, sounds at first like a contradiction in itself. In reality, it's the opposite of a coincidence. The dividing line runs precisely – just not between iPhone and Mac, but between the platforms the Digital Markets Act covers and those it does not. This turns a regional availability detail into a fundamental question – and it strikes at exactly what Apple has been promoting for years: control over your own data.
What EU Users Don't Get on iPhone and iPad
With the next generation of its operating systems, Apple is completely rebuilding the assistant. The new Siri is the most visible piece of the revamped Apple Intelligence: it is meant to hold conversations in context, understand what's visible on screen and trigger actions in apps. In the EU, none of that remains on iPhone and iPad at launch. Specifically, what's missing is the new standalone app in which earlier conversations can be revisited, the expanded Visual Intelligence, the integrated Writing Tools, the Siri mode in the Camera app, as well as all the other Siri AI features unveiled at WWDC.
Apple words the rejection unusually openly. Craig Federighi, Apple's head of software engineering, said he was "deeply disappointed" that EU users would not get Siri AI on iPhone and iPad at the launch of the new software; the company hopes to bring the assistant to the EU eventually, but currently has no timeline for doing so. This lack of any clear horizon is the real sting: it's not about a few weeks' delay, but about an open-ended wait.
It's not only consumers who are affected. Developers based in the EU also can't test or build the new Siri AI features into their iPhone and iPad apps for the time being – a restriction that over time can translate into a noticeable lag for the local app landscape. And the EU is not alone in this: Siri AI won't launch in China at first either, though there for different, country-specific regulatory reasons.
The Dividing Line Isn't iPhone vs. Mac, but Regulated vs. Unregulated
The striking thing about the block is its precision. In the same region, with the same Apple AI, the new Siri is missing on exactly two systems – and available on the others. Look for a cause, and exactly one variable remains that explains the pattern, and it isn't "Apple's whim" but DMA designation.
The European Commission designated iOS as a core platform service in September 2023, with iPadOS following on 29 April 2024 – in the iPad's case even though it did not meet the law's quantitative thresholds and the Commission had to justify the classification specifically on qualitative criteria. macOS, watchOS, visionOS and tvOS do not carry this designation. This is exactly the line Apple is now tracing: on Mac, Apple Watch and Apple Vision Pro – all of them outside the DMA's reach – the new Siri runs, while on iPhone and iPad it stays absent.
A concrete obligation hangs on that designation. For iOS and iPadOS, the DMA requires Apple to grant third parties free and effective interoperability with the features controlled by the operating system. Applied to the assistant, in Apple's reading this means: the deep system access the new Siri would have – to app actions, personal data, screen context – Apple would have to open up in the same form to any third-party AI. On the Mac or the Apple Watch this obligation does not apply, so the question doesn't arise there. That resolves the apparent inconsistency without having to prove any contradiction on Apple's part: it isn't a matter of convenience, but of regulatory exposure.
Apple's Concerns and the Rejected Compromise
Apple frames the matter as a question of protection – and gets specific about it. The interoperability the DMA demands would, from the company's point of view, mean that any assistant whatsoever would receive the same far-reaching access to the device as the new Siri: reading and sending messages, making purchases, accessing files, autonomously carrying out actions across third-party apps – and all of it without users being able to continuously see and control it. Apple points out that security researchers have already shown how such AI systems can be hijacked to siphon off passwords or photos. The fact that it didn't end in a flat-out refusal is part of the story too: by its own account, Apple offered a "Trusted System Agent" as a secure intermediary, along with a plan to launch Siri AI in the EU and roll this solution out over 18 months. The Commission declined and accepted none of the proposals.
The other side reads the same rules differently. In the Commission's view, the DMA requires Apple to grant competing AI systems the same access as its own assistant – not to let data flow away, but to keep the market open and contestable. That it isn't only Apple in the crosshairs is shown by a parallel case: just in January 2026, the Commission opened a comparable proceeding against Google to secure third parties the same access to those Android functions that Google's own AI services like Gemini use. Where Apple sees a security boundary, the regulator sees a competition mechanism. Both sides claim the user's interest for themselves, and it's at exactly this point that the two logics of protection collide.
On top of that comes a point that tends to get oversimplified in the debate. The new Siri relies on Gemini technology from Google's orbit for its larger models, and the most compute-intensive requests will indeed be processed by Apple via Private Cloud Compute on Google Cloud going forward. But it does not follow that every request ends up at Google the way it would with an ordinary Google service: by its own account, Apple retains control over the PCC software – devices only trust code signed by Apple – sticks to stateless processing with no data retention, and opens the systems up to independent security researchers for inspection. The accusation that a "privacy company" is here simply handing its users over to Google therefore only half hits the mark – even if proof that the guarantees hold on someone else's hardware is still pending.
In the End, the European User Loses
Here it's worth taking a step back. Apple's model relies on tight, controlled integration: as much as possible on the device, the rest walled off, access deliberately kept narrow – protection through closedness. The DMA pursues the opposite goal: openness, interoperability, breaking up gatekeeper power. This is not a contest between two equivalent protection concepts, because only one side promises privacy at all. And it's the same Apple AI that has long been shipping worldwide and, in the EU, on Mac, Apple Watch and Apple Vision Pro – it disappears solely where the DMA's access demand hits it.
That's the real punchline – and it has a bitter note. Privacy and control over your own data are no sideshow for Apple, but its central brand promise and, for a relevant share of buyers, a genuine argument at which the competition has been falling short for years. Of all places, in the region with the strictest privacy tradition, a different set of rules now ensures that the privacy-marketed feature is missing on the two most important platforms. Anyone who chose their iPhone partly because of exactly this promise is, in the EU, left without the feature for the time being.
That the interoperability obligations hang on iOS and iPadOS alone is a fact – and Apple's proposed solution was on the table before the Commission rejected it, without accepting a single one of the proposals. Whether every one of Apple's protection concerns is compelling can't be conclusively judged from the outside; but if an agreement at the negotiating table was possible, it certainly didn't fail for lack of proposals from Cupertino.
What remains is an uncomfortable reckoning. Apple Intelligence already arrived in Europe only in March 2025 after the same DMA limbo back in 2024; now the pattern repeats, this time without even a timeline. A set of rules that promises freedom of choice and open markets takes the software highlight of the year away from the European user of all people – and does so later than everywhere else. Who ends up being legally right changes little about that: the bill for the dispute between Cupertino and the European Commission is paid first by whoever has an iPhone in their pocket here.
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