Apple Intelligence could get Gemini alongside ChatGPT — here's why that's a big deal

Apple Intelligence — the AI interface for iPhones, iPads and Macs — has had a mixed response since it launched last year.

But following a misinformation-shaped bump in the road with the now withdrawn news summary feature, it’s getting better with each new version of the various operating systems. And we now have a hint that Apple is planning a major shakeup in how information can be generated in a future OS update.

A code dive in the backend for the iOS 18.4 beta from the X user Aaron Perris reveals a line that hints users will have a choice between Google and OpenAI. The latter makes ChatGPT which is the basis for Apple Intelligence’s intelligence at the moment, while the former makes Gemini which isn’t officially integrated at all at the time of writing.

Of course, the presence of code in beta software doesn’t necessarily mean that access to Google Gemini will be included in the full release of iOS 18.4 or even 18.5. But it does heavily suggest that we’ll see Gemini support in a future version — or at least that Apple is toying with the possibility.

This isn’t completely surprising. When Apple Intelligence was first mooted at last year’s WWDC developer conference, the company’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, said as much in a post-keynote conversation.

“We think ultimately people are going to have a preference perhaps for certain models that they want to use, maybe one that’s great for creative writing or one that they prefer for coding,” he said at the time. “And so we may look forward to doing integrations with different models like Google Gemini in the future. I mean, nothing to announce right now, but that’s our direction.”

From that, it appears that Apple’s implementation — should it actually happen — will be on the flexible side. If Federighi’s vision comes to pass, it sounds like you’ll be able to pick and choose which AI handles each tasks, meaning you get the best of all worlds.

Why it's a big deal

Different AI models excel at different things, which is why when we do head-to-head comparisons we set them a selection of varied challenges encompassing everything from coding to art generation.

On Gemini vs ChatGPT, the latter narrowly won 4-3, but it was a close-run thing — indeed, on the creative writing category, Gemini only lost because it went 78 words over the requested wordcount (ChatGPT added just 13). There’s also some subjectivity involved on the judge’s part: in our ChatGPT o3-mini vs Gemini 2.0 Flash face-off, the outcome was reversed with Google’s model winning by five to three.

Apple says we’ll see iOS 18.4 arriving for all users in April, and you can read about the features contained in the beta here. One that will definitely arrive with the full release is Apple News Plus Food, which the company has already promoted via its newsroom.