Siri Can Use Your App Now. Is It Ready for App Intents?

Siri can use your app now, whether you built for that or not. The honest answer to whether it's ready is split down the middle: the plumbing is ready, and most apps aren't.

Why This Actually Matters Now

iOS 27 reached general availability on September 14, 2026, bringing Siri AI, Apple's own description of an entirely new version of Siri built on the next generation of Apple Intelligence. The mechanism that makes it work for third-party apps is App Intents: a framework that lets an app describe its actions and content in a structured way Siri can discover, understand, and act on without the user ever opening the app itself. Ask Siri to create a task in a to-do app, and if that app has done the work, Siri does it directly. If it hasn't, Siri can't see that the action exists at all.

This isn't a feature toggle most teams can quietly skip. Apple has been explicit that new development should target App Intents exclusively going forward; existing SiriKit integrations keep working, but they're the legacy path now, not the forward one. And the reach is bigger than the Apple Intelligence headlines suggest: App Intents function on every iOS 27 device, back to iPhone 11, even though full on-device Apple Intelligence requires an iPhone 15 Pro or newer. An app that ignores this isn't opting out of a niche AI feature. It's opting out of how a meaningful share of its own users are about to start finding its features at all.

How App Intents Actually Work

The capability itself is genuinely more substantial than Siri's history of overpromising. App Schemas let a developer model an app's real content, tasks, messages, products, as entities Siri can search and reference by name, not just trigger with a fixed voice command. On-screen awareness means Siri can understand what's currently visible in an app and act on it contextually. Interaction Donations let an app teach Apple Intelligence from how people actually use its regular UI, not just its Siri-facing shortcuts, so the system gets smarter about a user's habits over time. None of this is vaporware; it shipped as documented, testable APIs at WWDC26, and developers had a full summer to build against it before the September GA.

The skepticism is earned, though. This is the same Siri overhaul Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported was originally slated for spring 2026, after Apple first previewed the concept of deep App Intents integration back in 2024. A feature that arrived roughly two years after it was first teased doesn't get the benefit of the doubt on day one, and Apple calling this "Siri AI" rather than an update is as much an admission of how far short the previous version fell as it is a pitch for the new one.

Both things are true at once, and that's the actual state of readiness worth naming: the Intent Gap, the distance between everything an app can do and the fraction of that it's actually exposed as a structured App Intent Siri can discover and act on. An app with fifty features and three defined intents is, to Siri, a three-action app. On-screen awareness and entity indexing don't retroactively expose functionality nobody described to the system; they only work for what's been explicitly modeled. Most apps, even sophisticated ones, are sitting on an Intent Gap their own product team has never measured.

Why Most Apps Aren't Ready

The Intent Gap persists for a boring reason: App Intents work has historically been treated as a Shortcuts nice-to-have, something handled in a slow sprint, not core product surface. That made sense when the payoff was a user manually building an automation inside the Shortcuts app. It stops making sense the moment Siri itself becomes a primary way a growing share of users try to get something done without opening an app at all.

There's a second, quieter reason. Modeling an app's real content as App Entities, not just its top-level actions, forces a team to actually define what their data model is in language a system can act on: what counts as a task, what fields matter, what states are valid. Plenty of apps have never had to make that explicit, because a human using the UI could infer meaning from layout and context that a structured schema has to say outright. Closing the Intent Gap isn't really an AI project. It's a data-modeling project wearing an AI feature's clothes, and that's exactly the kind of unglamorous work that keeps losing the roadmap argument to whatever ships a visible feature faster.

The apps that look ready in six months won't be the ones that waited for Siri AI to prove itself. They'll be the ones that treated App Intents like any other platform requirement, an API contract to implement correctly, not an optional AI garnish to add if there's time left in the sprint.

How to Close the Intent Gap

The practical version of closing the Intent Gap starts with an audit most teams haven't run: list every action a user can currently take in the app, then check how many of them exist as a defined App Intent today. The difference between those two numbers is the gap, measured, not assumed.

We've made a version of this argument for the web: a page that isn't structured for a non-human visitor to parse is invisible to that visitor no matter how good it looks to a person. App Intents are the same principle enforced at the OS level instead of the search-index level, with Apple deciding which apps get to participate in its own assistant rather than a search engine deciding which pages get cited. The deeper shift is the one we wrote about with GPT-6 Astra: a growing share of users won't be the ones operating an interface directly, and an app's job is to stay legible and verifiable to whoever, or whatever, is acting on their behalf. We've also covered where AI is actually earning its place inside mobile apps more broadly, and App Intents is the most consequential item on that list right now, not because it's the flashiest, but because it decides whether Siri can find an app at all. Apple just made that shift mandatory for anyone shipping new iOS features, whether or not they believe Siri AI itself is ready yet.

Siri is ready to use apps that were built for a world where being found required nothing more than a nice icon and an App Store listing. That world ended on September 14, 2026, whether most apps noticed or not.