Apple ditches its own ai, turns siri into an app store for chatbots
Tim Cook’s crew just admitted defeat. Apple Intelligence is nowhere to be seen, so the next Siri will rent its brain from Google, Anthropic and whoever else is willing to pay shelf space in a brand-new AI App Store.
The plan, sketched in Bloomberg’s latest leak, is as pragmatic as it is humiliating: instead of shipping a half-baked in-house model, Apple will let users bolt third-party bots onto a stripped-down, agnostic Siri. Want Gemini for search? Claude for creative writing? Stable Diffusion for images? One tap, one download, one recurring subscription fee that Apple carves up the same way it taxes Fortnite coins.
A marketplace where apple still controls the turnstile
The move flips the narrative. Yesterday’s embarrassment—Siri trailing Alexa, Google Assistant and every startup with a GPU cluster—becomes tomorrow’s cash register. Analysts at Morgan Stanley estimate the storefront could add $7 billion in high-margin services revenue by 2026 without Apple writing a single line of frontier-model code. Cook gets neutrality on stage, shareholders get growth on the spreadsheet.
Engineers inside the ML org are less thrilled. Teams that spent two years tuning Apple’s own Ajax transformer have watched internal demos pushed back quarter after quarter. Morale, already bruised by the October exodus of three TPU leads, sank further when management briefed the “Siri store” concept as Plan A. One staffer compared it to “putting a Ferrari badge on a rental lot.”
Consumers may not care about bruised egos. They care about latency. The current Siri backend still routes most requests through a 2019-era acoustic model; swapping in Gemini cuts inference time by 40 % on an iPhone 15 Pro, according to early TestFlight builds seen by TechBloom. The catch: every query now pings Google’s cloud, a privacy paradox for a company that still runs billboards boasting “What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone.”
The moment apple intelligence finally ships, everything could burn
Sources insist the storefront is modular—Apple Intelligence can slide in as just another tile once (if) it ships. But history smells like leverage: once Google and Anthropic reach scale on iOS, Apple can threaten to delist them unless they share ad revenue or grant deeper OS hooks. It’s the same playbook Apple used to squeeze Spotify and Netflix. Regulators in Brussels are already asking questions.
Cook, ever the poker player, dropped a telling aside in yesterday’s CNBC hit: “I don’t want people glued to their phones all day.” Translation: services that monetize attention off-device suit him fine—as long as Apple owns the toll booth.
The clock is brutal. Samsung bundles Gemini on the S24 now; Google’s Pixel folds Bard into the keyboard today. Every month Apple waits, another hundred million prompts migrate to Android. Cupertino can still print money while it stalls, but the loophole closes the instant regulators decide a default Siri tile counts as self-preferencing.
Bottom line: Apple isn’t late to the AI party—it’s charging cover at the door and letting rivals bring the playlist. Genius hedge or permanent surrender? The revenue counters start spinning this spring when the beta storefront drops in iOS 18.4. If subscriptions surge, Apple Intelligence may arrive not as a saviour but as an optional extra on its own operating system.