Apple confirmed on October 31, in a post on its China Newsroom, that the first Apple Intelligence features will open for testing in mainland China from November 4 in the latest iOS developer beta, and will reach the public with iOS 27.3 in December. That settles the timing left open when approval was announced on October 15 — the test build arrives in November, not late October, and Bloomberg's reported December launch is now Apple's own date.

The first wave is the established feature set: Writing Tools, Live Translation in Messages, FaceTime, Phone and through AirPods, Visual Intelligence, Clean Up and natural-language search in Photos, on iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, iPhone 16 and later, iPhone Air and iPhone Duo. Where other countries get ChatGPT inside Siri, China gets Alibaba: Apple says it has partnered with Alibaba so users can reach Qwen directly within Siri, Writing Tools and Visual Intelligence.

What China does not get is the new Siri AI or the other next-generation features announced at WWDC 2026 — Apple says so explicitly — and Image Playground is not on the list either. The rollout is iPhone-only for now; Apple says support for other platforms will follow after further approvals.