Visual Intelligence now lets apps register as image search providers via App Intents, returning matched entities when users highlight and search images. Introduced in iOS 26 and now expanded to iPadOS and macOS in iOS 27, apps can surface rich, ranked results directly in the Visual Intelligence UI.
ā¢ Apps can surface relevant content (albums, products, events) directly inside the system Visual Intelligence results sheet without any user context-switching
ā¢ The same IntentValueQuery, entity, and OpenIntent code works across iOS, iPadOS, and macOS with no platform-specific rewrites required
ā¢ System store integrations (EventKit, Contacts, HealthKit) let Visual Intelligence automatically feed structured data into your app, turning the OS into a passive input source
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.