Craig Federighi Finally Explains Why Siri Was Delayed—and What’s Coming Next

WWDC kicked off yesterday, and as usual, a few Apple execs have gotten face time with different creators, including iJustine, who might be the most popular Apple content creator on YouTube. She was able to sit down with Apple’s software chief, Craig Federighi, for a few minutes to talk about different things.

Of course, iJustine asked about the Siri delay. After all, it was shown off last year at WWDC, and then it was announced to have been delayed by up to a year, just a few months ago.

What we said a while ago was that we were really working hard to get those [features] to come together. [We] had them working internally, but not working well enough.

You know, when you have an experience like asking Siri to do something, either it becomes something you can depend on reliably, or it’s something in the end you’re not going to use. And we were not able to take the approach we were taking to the quality level in the time frame that initially we thought we could. And so, we’re continuing to build on it.

Executives tend to have the habit of giving long answers to questions without really answering the question. But Federighi was pretty good here at giving some very good answers. Essentially, Apple got Siri working with the new features, but they weren’t working well enough to ship. Which is a bit odd given the current state of iOS 26 beta. The team also knew that unreliable Siri features were ultimately going to be useless. And finally, the team had to switch approaches, which does explain a bit, the delay for Siri.

Apple will ship all Siri features teased, and much more

Federighi doubled down again by saying that Apple would ship everything that’s been announced previously, at some point. Of course, when that is, is up in the air. He also teased “and more” features coming to Siri.

Siri is due for a major glow-up. Believe it or not, Siri was the first personal assistant to launch. It launched before Google Assistant, before Cortana, and before Amazon Alexa. Yet, it has been a laughing stock virtually the entire time it has existed. With all the features that Apple is touting for Siri, it could become a very major upgrade, and make it actually worth using.

The iOS 26 release date is set for this fall, though we wouldn’t expect to see many other Siri features launch by then. Apple does tend to keep some features exclusive and under wraps for the new iPhone, however.