Apple releases Apple Intelligence features to developers as part of iOS 18.1 beta

For those of you who don’t torture yourself by running sometimes buggy beta versions of Apple’s operating systems, here’s how it works: Apple holds its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June and announces all of the new OSes and their features that will be released in the Fall, typically September for iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and tvOS, and September-November for macOS. On the very day that the new OSes are announced in June, developers get access to beta versions of those releases. Those first few betas always include bugs, which is why most people shouldn’t install them. So far, in that sense, this year’s beta season has been just like any other.

What’s different this year is that everyone is clamoring to experience Apple Intelligence, which was the big star of this year’s WWDC. And up until this week, none of the Apple Intelligence features had been available in any of the betas. This week, Apple released a second beta channel. You could either continue testing current and future betas of iOS 18, for example, or join a beta channel for iOS 18.1. I can’t recall another example of a “dot one” beta release this early in the cycle. And the new bifurcated betas also apply to iPadOS and macOS.

Not every Apple Intelligence feature that was announced last month is available to test in this first beta, but a lot of it is, including Mail and Safari summarization, an updated voice for Siri, the new Siri animation, and writing tools. There’s more, and MacRumors has an excellent breakdown of all of the features now available to developers.

From a big picture standpoint, what I’m taking away from this week’s new beta releases is that it would appear that Apple is planning to release Apple Intelligence as part of iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS 15.1. The downside is that that means they won’t be available until likely a few weeks after the initial release of these OS updates, but we probably won’t have to wait until, say, March to get these as some rumors had suggested. Having said that, the fact that not all Apple Intelligence features are available in this update could indicate that Apple will stagger the release of Apple Intelligence features. I think that’s totally fine, and probably even helps ramp up the additional server capabilities they’ll need to accommodate the Private Cloud Compute portion of Apple Intelligence.

And what is available to developers in this first set of betas seems to be very stable by all accounts. That tells me that Apple is managing the development of these features quite capably. I’ll have more info as we continue throughout the rest of Summer and into Fall, so stay tuned.