Apple opens Siri AI to third-party apps with developer preview in 27.3 betas

Apple has given developers their first official way into Siri AI, the more capable assistant it launched in September. The Siri AI Developer Preview is in the iOS, iPadOS and macOS 27.3 betas, letting third-party apps integrate with the assistant so their actions and content are available to it, InfoQ reported.

This matters because an assistant is only as useful as what it can act on. Apple's September Siri AI launch emphasized onscreen awareness and real-world reasoning, but without third-party integration those abilities stayed mostly inside Apple's own apps. A developer preview is the first step toward Siri running multi-step tasks across apps such as messaging, travel, productivity and smart-home tools. It is the same kind of agentic, tool-using behavior that OpenAI is pursuing with Business Agents and Google with its Gemini agent features.

The timing also lines up with Apple's hardware. The same week, Apple released HomeView, a smart display built around Siri AI, and its upcoming Harbor Mac app for running local models drew developer interest. Apple's competitive edge is on-device and private processing. Its weakness has been that rivals' assistants already link to large ecosystems of services, so opening Siri to developers is necessary to catch up.

The main limitation is hardware. MacDailyNews notes the full Apple Intelligence and Siri AI suite runs only on newer iPhone models, which narrows the audience developers can reach at first. It's a beta, too, so APIs may change before release. Watch for which major apps adopt the integration early, whether Apple lets Siri trigger purchases or transactions through third-party apps, and whether the final 27.3 release ships with the integration on by default.