Apple CEO John Ternus is not happy with Siri, and he has now told the person in charge of fixing it. In a closed-door meeting in the last few weeks, Ternus pressed software chief Craig Federighi to speed up Apple’s AI roadmap and aim beyond a better voice assistant, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in his Power On newsletter on Sunday, November 8. The goal is a Siri that works like an agent: software that follows a goal and keeps working on it without the user starting each step.
Apple has not confirmed any of this. The report rests on unnamed sources, and at least one outlet that covered it, AppleInsider, notes the account contradicts itself in places and should be taken with a grain of salt. But the pieces Gurman describes line up with what Apple has already shipped, and with the dates already on the calendar.
Ternus wants Siri to chase OpenAI and Meta, not just answer questions
According to Gurman, Ternus is pushing Federighi because Apple leaders privately admit the company is not keeping pace with rivals whose agents already do tasks on their own. OpenAI’s agent, called Dots, can book travel, manage schedules, and work across services with little human help. Meta is rolling out an agent called Muse across its apps. Anthropic and xAI have agents that operate software directly, clicking buttons and finishing multi-step jobs.
Apple controls the iPhone, the Mac, and the iPad, yet it still has no comparable capability, Gurman notes. Siri AI launched in beta with iOS 27 on September 14, 2026, and Apple added five more languages with iOS 27.2 in October. It can answer questions and use ChatGPT for harder ones, but it cannot yet carry a task through to completion on its own. That gap is what Ternus reportedly wants closed.
Two upgrades are coming, and the dates are already set
The report describes two upgrades arriving in the coming months. The first is finer control over Apple’s own apps in iOS 27.3, which is due in December. The second is third-party app integration in spring 2027, which The Verge says would let Siri do things like place a Grubhub order or book an OpenTable reservation.
Some of the groundwork is already public. On November 3, Apple opened Siri AI to developers through a new Developer Preview, letting third-party apps build “app skills” that Siri can call on. Apple says that preview rolls out officially in the spring. And on November 5, Apple removed the Siri AI waitlist entirely, so any compatible iPhone can now turn the feature on without waiting for an invitation.
Gurman puts the bigger prize, a fully agentic Siri, as early as 2027. That is a target, not a promise, and Apple has already delayed Siri upgrades once before, in 2025, when promised features slipped.
iOS 28 development is changing shape at the same time
The same newsletter reports a shake-up in how Apple builds its next operating system. For iOS 28, Apple reportedly gave engineers six weeks of feature development and experimentation in the first milestone, followed by two weeks of integration, a longer build phase than usual. The next milestone is scheduled to begin Monday, November 9, when Apple starts finalizing which features make it into the update. The change is said to cover iPadOS 28 and macOS 28 as well.
There is also uncertainty at the top of the Siri team. Mike Rockwell, who took over Siri in March 2025, “continues to seriously consider” leaving his role as Siri chief, or Apple altogether, next year, Gurman reports. A departure would land in the middle of the most ambitious Siri rebuild in the assistant’s history.
What it means for your iPhone
For iPhone owners, the near-term markers are concrete. iOS 27.3 arrives in December with Siri gaining deeper control of Apple’s own apps. The spring update should open the door to third-party apps, which is where an assistant starts to feel like an agent: one request, and Siri handles the booking, the order, or the scheduling across the apps you already use.
The longer question is whether Apple can close the gap with rivals that already ship agents. Apple shipped a working version of Siri AI on what Gurman calls an “incredibly short timeline,” and it has moved fast since, opening the developer preview and dropping the waitlist within days of each other. The next few months will show whether that pace holds, or whether the agentic Siri slips into the same delays that marked 2025.
| Date | What happens |
|---|---|
| November 9, 2026 | iOS 28 milestone 2 begins, Apple finalizes the feature lineup |
| December 2026 | iOS 27.3 ships, Siri gains control of Apple’s first-party apps |
| Spring 2027 | Third-party Siri app integration rolls out officially |
| 2027 | Agentic Siri targeted, according to Bloomberg’s Gurman |
Apple’s software chief has his orders, and the calendar is already set. The question now is execution, and iPhone users will get their first real answer in December, when iOS 27.3 lands. For the background on what Siri can already do, see our guide to turning on Siri AI now that the waitlist is gone, and our report on Siri AI opening to every app, and the fine print on paid usage limits. The December update is covered in our iOS 27.3 beta 1 rundown, and the CEO driving this push is the subject of our look at John Ternus’s first earnings test.
