Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, explained why the company launched a standalone Siri app in iOS 27, after previously calling a dedicated chatbot contrary to its Apple Intelligence strategy.
The new Siri app, announced at WWDC earlier this week, gives users a centralized place to manage and review their conversations with the Siri AI. Federighi addressed this apparent about-face during a post-keynote discussion for media at Apple Park this week, responding directly to a question about Apple’s past public stance.
After WWDC 2025, Federighi and senior vice president of global marketing Greg Joswiak went on a media tour during which they described Apple’s approach as integrating Siri into the user’s existing workflow rather than offering “a built-in chatbot on the side.”
Federighi said this week that the decision was based on a practical user need to return to and continue past Siri conversations. Apple determined that a home screen app was the most natural option on its platform for this purpose and presented the Siri app as an extension of the system experience rather than a standalone product:
We don’t think of Siri as a separate chatbot, just a non-integrated place where you go to chat, but rather as an integral conversational tool that you use in the moment, deeply integrated into your experience.
Understanding what’s on the screen, being able to interface, not in a separate world, but directly into the document that you’re editing and that you want help with proofreading, that you want advice on. And so all of these experiences are conversational. They’re actually an extension of your system experience, deeply integrated into your flow.
Now, we’ve gone back and forth to figure out what’s the best way to go back to a conversation that you had, because you want to continue it, you want to reference it, and quite honestly, on our platform, the most natural possibility for any user to find something like that is to have an app that they can manage on their home screen, launch it and come back to it. So we have a Siri app, and this Siri app just reincarnates the capabilities of that core system experience.
The iOS 27 developer beta is available now, although access to the new Siri requires joining a waitlist in Settings, with a public beta expected in July.
