$Apple(AAPL.US) is planning to launch Apple Intelligence in mainland China in December as part of the iOS 27.3 update, per Bloomberg

That ends a regulatory delay of about two years. The features first rolled out in the US with iOS 18.1 in October 2024

The China launch is set to include Genmoji, notification summaries, Writing Tools, and Clean Up in Photos

It will leave out the new Siri AI and other features announced this year, along with the company's in-house image generation tools. Some text generation features will also be limited

To get approved, $Apple(AAPL.US) built guardrails with $Alibaba(BABA.US), including a filter that lets the Chinese government approve ongoing updates to the AI models. It is also working with $Baidu(BIDU.US) on search and Siri features

Permits issued Sept 29 cleared recent iPhones to run Apple Intelligence with $Alibaba(BABA.US)'s Qwen and Tongyi Wanxiang models

Greater China revenue was $18.8B last quarter, up 22.4% from a year ago, and $Apple(AAPL.US) closed up about 0.5% on a red day for the market

Two year old features will not out-AI Huawei or Xiaomi on their home turf, but that was never really the bar. The missing AI checkbox has been a sales headwind in China, and it goes away right as the iPhone Duo launches there next week. Greater China is already tied with Europe as the fastest growing region, so the March quarter China number is where this either shows up or doesn't

Source: StockMarket.News