Siri AI opens to every developer, but App Store apps must wait for spring

Any app can now add custom actions and skills to Siri AI, but only dev and internal TestFlight builds can use them.

Apps · Macfolio · 4 November 2026

Siri AI opens to every developer, but App Store apps must wait for spring — Image: Apple

Apple opened a Siri AI Developer Preview on November 3, 2026, alongside the first betas of iOS 27.3, iPadOS 27.3, macOS 27.3 and visionOS 27.3. Any developer can now expose custom actions and content to Siri AI through App Intents, without a new entitlement or a separate program. The catch is timing: nothing built on the preview can ship to customers yet.

What developers get

According to Apple's developer news post and documentation, the preview lets Siri AI find an app's custom content and run its custom actions, not only those that fit Apple's existing schema domains. The main pieces:

Custom intents and entities that Siri can use with personal context, onscreen awareness and natural language requests
App skills: "SKILL.md" Markdown files in a skills bundle that tell Siri how several actions fit together, with a 10,000 character limit per skill body
Siri Integration Advisor in Xcode and a new SiriEvaluations framework for scripting test requests
Any entity in the Spotlight semantic index can now surface in Siri AI

Apple says it has also started adding these actions to its own apps, including Finder, Files, Mail, Notes, Preview, Reminders, Safari and Shortcuts. Apple engineers are running Apple Intelligence Group Labs on November 4 and November 5.

Limits to plan around

The preview works only in development builds and for internal TestFlight testers. External testers and App Store versions get none of the new Siri behavior. Apple says customers get these capabilities "in a few months" and App Store submission opens in the spring, and it has not yet published terms or usage policies for Siri AI experiences. Siri AI itself remains unavailable in the EU on iOS, iPadOS and watchOS, is not offered to users under 13, and runs in English, French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish for now.

This does not mean Siri will start driving your apps on shipping devices this year, and Apple stresses that skills guide Siri rather than enforce a fixed sequence of steps.

Our take: if your Mac or iOS app already has solid App Intents, this is a cheap experiment, and the skills format is refreshingly plain. Spend the time on clear intent titles and descriptions now, then wait for the terms before betting a roadmap on it.

Caveats: Apple's macOS 27.3 release notes list a known issue where Siri on the Mac cannot find third-party Spotlight entities unless they conform to a schema, so Mac developers will not see the full feature yet. APIs may change during the preview.

What developers get

Limits to plan around

Primary Sources