When Apple first introduced Apple Intelligence, the company was pretty open to the idea of not building a chatbot for Siri. Now, things have changed a bit — and the company is rumored to be releasing a Siri app in iOS 27so users can chat with the next generation of Apple Foundation Models. While that’s a great starting point, there’s a better idea that could be leveraged here.
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People already use an Apple app every day for conversations. Why not use it for AI?
It would not be unimaginable to have a ‘Siri’ conversation in the Messages app. The only real issue would be the desire to separate the conversation history, but it probably wouldn't be very difficult to add a selector for conversational AI apps so that conversation chains can be separated.
This is only the beginning though. Why not bring in third parties?
Apple, at least so far, has missed the opportunity to be a dominant AI platform. Certainly, you can download AI apps from the App Store, but Apple does not actually own any part of this experience yet.
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There are already several AI chat apps that likely rely on Mac mini server farms to provide an experience over iMessage. Most notably, Poke.
Apple already offers Business Chat. If you've ever contacted a company's support through the Messages app, you've probably experienced it. It's not exactly developer-friendly, though. If Apple, with iOS 27, introduced a new API for developers to launch AI chat apps in iMessage, it would unlock a lot of potential.
Instead of having to open the Claude app to manage your Claude Code Remote Control, what if you could just do it from Messages? Or, if you have a finance app with an AI chatbot, what if it could just message you about your spending in iMessage, instead of having to think about opening the app?
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Furthermore, it gives developers a larger user base, as the user will see it on iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch, instead of where they installed the app – usually only on iPhone.
