Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) said on October 31 that Apple Intelligence will reach iPhone users in mainland China in December, with the official release of iOS 27.3, and that developers can start testing the features on November 4 in the latest iOS developer beta. Apple's announcement on its China newsroom also confirms that Alibaba's Qwen models will answer some requests in Siri, Writing Tools and Visual Intelligence.
The launch ends a wait of more than two years. Apple Intelligence went live in the US on October 28, 2024; China's developer testing begins 737 days later, by SaasBuzz's count. Over the same stretch, Greater China has stayed Apple's third-largest market, and its sales there rose 30% in the first nine months of fiscal 2026.
What launches, and on whose model
The first wave is iPhone only. Apple lists the iPhone 16 and later, iPhone Duo, iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max and iPhone Air, with both Siri and the device language set to English or Simplified Chinese. Support for Apple's other platforms will follow "after necessary approvals are obtained," the company said in Chinese (our translation).
The features are the core set Apple has shipped elsewhere:
Writing Tools to rewrite, proofread and summarize text
Visual Intelligence, which identifies objects and places through the iPhone camera
Live Translation in Messages, FaceTime and Phone, and for in-person conversations through supported AirPods
Clean Up in Photos, natural-language photo search and Memory movies
Genmoji, custom emoji made from a text description
Mail summaries, Priority messages in Mail and Smart Replies in Mail and Messages
Notification summaries, Priority Notifications and the Reduce Interruptions Focus
Summaries of Notes audio recordings and of call transcripts, and Type to Siri
Qwen is the new part. Apple says Siri can hand certain requests to Qwen, that Writing Tools gains a Create option in which Qwen writes original text from scratch, and that users reach Qwen by signing in to a Qwen account or with Sign in with Apple. 9to5Mac reported, and Apple's release also says, that the update excludes Siri AI: in 9to5Mac's words, users get Qwen "for certain requests, but not Siri AI itself."
Alibaba had confirmed its role in July. It told CNBC that Qwen would be "integrated into Apple Intelligence experiences," TechCrunch reported, after Reuters reported that the Cyberspace Administration of China had approved the services. A Baidu spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch then that Baidu was also working with Apple on developing Apple Intelligence features for Chinese users. Apple's October 31 release names only Alibaba.
Why China matters to Apple's numbers
Apple's filings show how much rides on the market. In the nine months to June 27, 2026, Greater China brought in $64.8 billion of net sales, up 30% from a year earlier and 17.8% of Apple's total, behind only the Americas and Europe, according to its 10-Q for the third quarter. Apple put the rise down "primarily" to "higher net sales of iPhone," and said a stronger renminbi also helped.
The comparison SaasBuzz ran shows how sharply the trend turned. Those nine months alone already exceed the $64.4 billion Greater China produced in all of fiscal 2025, a year in which its sales fell 4%, after an 8% fall in fiscal 2024, according to Apple's 2025 annual report.
Period | Sales | Change | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
FY2023 | $72.6B | n/a | 18.9% |
FY2024 | $67.0B | -8% | 17.1% |
FY2025 | $64.4B | -4% | 15.5% |
9 mo. FY26 | $64.8B | +30% | 17.8% |
Source: Apple's fiscal 2025 Form 10-K and its 10-Q for the quarter ended June 27, 2026; Greater China net sales; change from the year before; share of Apple's total net sales. SaasBuzz calculations.
So the growth came mainly from iPhone sales, without Apple Intelligence on the phones. December tests whether the AI features add to that.
What the industry is saying
Mark Gurman, the Bloomberg managing editor who covers Apple, wrote on X late on October 30, US time, that the timing matched what he expected and that the public date came from Apple.
Post on X by @markgurman
iOS 27.3 beta is now launching next week, including Apple Intelligence in China as expected. Public release in December, Apple confirms.
The launch also comes as Apple's new chief executive, John Ternus, sets out how he thinks about AI. Asked by WIRED's Steven Levy about two views of Apple, that it is still catching up on AI or that it is smart not to build a frontier model, in an interview published on October 30, Ternus said Apple would use AI to build products people value. "We don't want to ship AI for AI's sake," he said. "What matters is, did we build something that they really love?"
China tests that approach on someone else's terms: Apple's features arrive there with Alibaba's model handling some requests, and its other platforms wait on approvals.
What it means for developers and software buyers
For app makers, the change arrives through the operating system. Apple describes Writing Tools as system-wide, so text fields in apps on a Chinese iPhone will offer Qwen's Create option alongside Apple's own rewriting and proofreading. Apple's announcement does not say whether its developer frameworks for on-device models work in China, or how Qwen requests are handled for privacy, so teams that build on those features should test on the November 4 beta before promising anything to users there.
For Alibaba, the sign-in matters as much as the model. Because users reach Qwen through a Qwen account or Sign in with Apple, Alibaba gets an account relationship with the iPhone owners who use it, from inside Siri and Writing Tools.
For companies that buy and manage iPhones in China, the limits are practical. The features need the device language and Siri set to English or Simplified Chinese, Macs and iPads wait for further approvals, and requests that go to Qwen are answered by Alibaba's model through a Qwen account. A company with iPhone users in China should check its AI-use and data rules against that path as well as Apple's own.
