iOS 27 extends App Intents with new APIs for custom Siri dialog responses, interaction donations, OwnershipProvidingEntity for smart confirmations, and IndexedEntityQuery for semantic Spotlight indexing ā enabling richer, more personal Siri and Apple Intelligence experiences.
ā¢ New OwnershipProvidingEntity protocol lets entities declare public/shared state so Siri auto-confirms before mutating shared data
ā¢ New IndexedEntityQuery protocol supports on-demand reindexing requests from Spotlight for App Entities
ā¢ IntentDonationManager API now supports donating schema-conforming intents from UI interactions for Apple Intelligence context
ā¢ ProvidesDialog and ShowsSnippetView return types on perform() allow fully custom Siri response text and SwiftUI snippet views
ā¢ Interaction Donations let Apple Intelligence learn from in-app UI actions (not just Siri calls), so it can infer the right app and contact for future requests
ā¢ OwnershipProvidingEntity tells Siri whether an entity is private or shared, triggering appropriate confirmation dialogs before side-effecting actions
ā¢ IndexedEntityQuery + indexAppEntities enables semantic (meaning-based) Spotlight search so Siri can find your content by intent, not just keyword
Foundation Models is a new Apple framework introduced in iOS 27 that gives developers on-device access to the same Apple Intelligence language model powering system features, enabling text generation, structured output, and tool-calling entirely on-device without a network connection.
Visual Intelligence brings iOS 17's Visual Look Up capabilities to a new developer-facing API surface in iOS 27, letting apps pipe live camera frames or static images through on-device scene understanding to extract subjects, text, barcodes, and rich semantic labels without any cloud round-trip.
iOS 27 opens the Foundation Models framework to third-party LLM providers via a new public LanguageModel protocol, enabling anyone to integrate custom, server-based, or open-source models using the same Swift API as Apple's on-device system model.
In-depth guide
iOS 27 On-Device AI & Apple Intelligence āApp Schemas let developers describe their app's content and actions using pre-defined domain schemas (like the Calendar domain) so Siri can understand, search, and act on app data without custom NLP. Entities conforming to IndexedEntity are donated to Spotlight's semantic index, enabling natural-language queries over app content.