Apple's iOS 18 Development Delays Impact iOS 19 Timeline and Features

Continued iOS 18 development is impacting iOS 19's production

The launch and development of Apple Intelligence and other iOS 18 features could impact iOS 19, due to engineers working on the AI push. Apple's development of features for operating systems usually reaches a crescendo with their introduction in a major fall release. However, the amount of work still being carried out in iOS 18 could cause problems for iOS 19. In a post to X, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman claims he continues to "hear that the gradual rollout of features across iOS 18 to iOS 18.4 is leading to delays of some features scheduled for iOS 19." With engineers tied up on iOS 18 projects, including the intensive work on Apple Intelligence, this means they aren't working on projects for the iOS 19 release, Gurman adds. In turn, the long iOS 18 engineering slog will also lead to "a long term rollout of features next cycle as well," with Apple's teams fighting to catch up. To users, this could translate into more features being announced for iOS 19, but a longer wait before they actually get implemented in the operating system. Gurman doesn't directly mention Apple Intelligence, but given that the bulk of the new features in iOS 18 are associated with it and its extended rollout period, there's little else the continued work could refer to. While this is a rumor based on one source, it is something that is entirely believable. Slips in development are extremely common thought the software industry, both for single-run software launches and more regular updates like operating systems. Bigger slips also have the potential for features to miss an intended release date, or even an entire version. Slips are practically a fact of life for developers, and something that is constantly battled. For Apple, the risk is in missing out on adding enough new features or other improvements to iOS 19 that it becomes a lackluster update to users. However, with users fairly used to the idea of features arriving months after launch, this shouldn't be a massive problem for Apple to deal with. Even with this risk, Apple does have a well-established development process and cycle, which it has previously demonstrated it can adapt to meet its needs. In late October 2023, Apple stalled development of iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and its other major 2024 updates for a week. It was later explained that it was a week of debugging, in a bid to make the releases as bug-free as possible. In 2019, after observing software glitches after an iPhone launch, Apple made a series of development procedure changes. This also occurred after Apple had to postpone several features destined for iOS 12 to arrive in iOS 13 instead.

The iOS 18 feature backlog has got so bad it's starting to affect iOS 19

Apple forced to take engineers off iOS 19 development to deal with delayed features. Troubling news from inside Apple Park, where the engineering team is reportedly struggling to deal with the increasingly dire state of iOS 18 development. The public version of iOS 18.0 launched back in September, but it did so without the inclusion of Apple Intelligence, the most highly anticipated new feature for this cycle. It's debatable whether the company always planned to hold back Apple Intelligence until a later software update, but it seems unlikely, given that this meant the iPhone 16 launched without its flagship feature. Apple Intelligence eventually arrived as part of the iOS 18.1 update at the end of October, but was still missing many of its features (including Image Playground, the heavily hyped generative AI illustration feature), not to mention support for any countries other than the U.S. England-language users in Australia, Canada, Ireland, South Africa, New Zealand, and the U.K. had to wait until iOS 18.2, which has just arrived, and Apple is set to carry on adding new AI features well into 2025. iPhone owners in other countries who are keen to try out Apple Intelligence may be heartened by a seeming leak by Apple, which claims in the iOS 18.2 press release that the "initial set" of additional languages will arrive in April 2025. It's not clear which will be first, but the company said it's working on support for "Chinese, English (India), English (Singapore), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, and Vietnamese." Nevertheless, according to well-informed Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman, the iOS 18 rollout is not going according to plan. So much so that engineers who were supposed to be working on next year's iOS 19 update have been told to pitch in with iOS 18 instead. Gurman previously reported that Apple was working on a major upgrade for Siri in iOS 19, including the development of a of more advanced large language model. It's not clear whether this delay will change the schedule for that release or if it was always planned for a mid-cycle launch like the "next-gen Siri" coming as part of iOS 18 in 2025. That diversion of resources may help in the short term, but it's storing up problems for the future. With the result that iOS 19, according to Gurman, will have a staggered rollout of features much like iOS 18, and features that might have been slated to appear in iOS 19.0 being pushed back to a later release.