NEWS

Siri AI Still Cannot Read Gmail or WhatsApp

Siri AI still cannot search Gmail or WhatsApp, even after Apple sold personal context as the iPhone AI edge at its September event.

Published

3 weeks ago

September 10, 2026

Harry

An early developer build of Siri AI cannot find messages in Gmail or WhatsApp, a gap that survived Apple’s first AI-heavy iPhone event under CEO John Ternus.

On Sept. 9 in Cupertino, Apple sold the rebuilt assistant as the private brain that already knows your messages, emails, and photos. Testers of that developer preview had already learned those inboxes still meant Apple’s own apps.

The Coconut Cookie Demo Stops at iMessage

When Apple first showed Siri AI at WWDC on June 8, an employee asked about a dessert his daughter had mentioned. The assistant found her text about coconut cookies, then put the cookies on a party menu it shared in a group chat.

Try the same request in WhatsApp, and Siri AI says it cannot find any messages. It lacks access to the app. That was the state of an early developer build as of the first week of September, and Google had not updated Gmail to support Siri AI either.

Apple’s own pitch is built on that cookie trick. Craig Federighi, senior vice president of Software Engineering, framed the assistant as a tool that finds information and then does something with it, across apps, without a stilted command.

We’re excited to introduce Siri AI, a dramatically more capable and conversational assistant designed to help users find information and get things done throughout the day. With access to broad world knowledge for up-to-date answers on virtually any topic, along with onscreen awareness and personal context understanding, Siri AI can help users take action across apps more naturally than ever.

Craig Federighi, senior vice president of Software Engineering, Apple newsroom

The June examples were a restaurant a friend messaged, a hotel confirmation buried in old mail, and photos from a recent trip. Those demos run cleanly when the thread lives in Messages and the mail lives in Mail. They stall when the same facts live in WhatsApp or Gmail, which is where a large share of actual iPhone mail and chat still sits.

Siri AI cannot read Gmail or WhatsApp messages — early Siri AI developer preview Gmail WhatsApp gap

Wednesday Named WhatsApp for Sending

Ternus had been CEO for eight days when he opened the Surprise and Shine event, having taken over from Tim Cook on Sept. 1. He called the iPhone the best personal device for AI because of its privacy protections and its deep knowledge of its own users. Executives around him repeated the same stack argument: Apple makes the hardware, the operating system, and the data on the phone, so it is the firm best placed to deliver the assistant.

The product claim that followed was specific. Siri AI can hold a conversation, notice what is on screen, and take action across more than 300,000 third-party apps. A dedicated Siri app lands on the Home Screen, with chats synced over iCloud. The company named a short list of partners while it said that.

APPS APPLE NAMED ON WEDNESDAY

WhatsApp: Send a message through Meta’s chat app.
Outlook: Draft an email in Microsoft’s client.
Audible: Play an audiobook already in the library.
Notability: Find an assignment inside class notes.
Tripsy: Save a restaurant or travel tip into a trip.
Stuff: Turn spoken tasks and dates into a list.

Sending a WhatsApp is not the same job as finding the coconut-cookie text inside one. Drafting in Outlook is not the same job as searching Gmail. Apple can put WhatsApp on a slide as an action target and still leave the assistant blind to the archive that makes “personal context” worth saying out loud.

Naming WhatsApp on stage reads as a public nudge at Meta, not as proof the search path is live. After the keynote, people who follow the assistant were still hoping WhatsApp would actually open up. Gmail never made the list at all.

Apple Already Wrote the Mail Playbook

This is not a missing API. Apple has already published the contract. Developers plug a third-party app into the rebuilt Siri through the App Intents framework for Siri and Spotlight, a system that has existed since iOS 16 in 2022. At WWDC 2026 Apple deprecated SiriKit and made App Intents the door Siri AI uses to call into someone else’s app.

The Mail domain is blunt about what “support” means. Apple’s developer pages list mail intent schemas for compose and search, and they come as a group. If an email app adopts one of them, Xcode expects the rest.

THE 12 MAIL SCHEMAS GMAIL WOULD NEED

Schema	Example phrase Apple publishes
createDraft	Write an email about photos from team dinner
updateDraft	Add a recipient or set the subject
saveDraft	Draft this email for later
openDraft	Open the draft email to John and James
deleteDraft	Trash my most recent draft
sendDraft	Send this email tomorrow at 9 PM
openMessage	Open the email about team offsite instructions
replyMail	Reply to mail thread with my manager
forwardMail	Forward the baseball schedule email
updateMail	Mark this email as read, or flag it
archiveMail	Archive book club emails
deleteMail	Trash all mail from a store

That is 12 intents, not a single “let Siri search my inbox” switch. The Messages domain is built the same way, with schemas for draft, send, edit, unsend, and read status, so a chat app that wants in is supposed to look like Apple’s own Messages to Siri. Apple also told developers that personal context reaches third-party apps when they integrate with Spotlight, which is how a hotel confirmation in Gmail would ever show up beside a text in Messages.

Matthew Cassinelli, an App Intents specialist who previously worked on Workflow at Apple, has been watching teams try to fill those schemas with generated code. The boilerplate is getting easier. The product design is not.

It can take a feature and make an app intent out of it, but it can’t understand when a set of features should be one modular intent.

Matthew Cassinelli, App Intents specialist, formerly at Apple on Workflow

He has called the current output minimally passable. That is the other half of the Gmail problem. Even a willing developer still has to model the inbox as Siri expects it, then keep those intents current as the assistant gains new tricks.

Why Google Would Keep Gmail off Siri

Google declined to comment on Siri AI and had not updated Gmail to include support. It already lets people find mail inside Gmail by talking to Gemini. Handing that same archive to Apple’s assistant would train iPhone users to ask Siri first, and it would do so on a phone Google does not control.

Meta declined to comment on its plans. Amazon did not immediately comment on whether it would expand support. Apple did not comment on the Gmail and WhatsApp gap. The silence is the tell. For Amazon, Google, and Meta, plugging into Siri AI can make their apps easier to find on iPhone, and it can also sideline their own assistants.

Gmail is the sharp case because Google sits on both sides of Apple’s launch. The search company already offers the feature Siri is selling, inside the app Siri cannot see. Every time a user asks Siri to find a flight confirmation and gets a shrug, Gemini is one tap away with the mail sitting there.

Apple Mail and Messages will still feel magical on day one. Native apps do not need a third party’s permission. Siri can even match a user’s usual tone when it writes in Mail and Messages, down to the punctuation they use with a given person. That is a real trick. It is also a trick that stops at the Apple-branded inbox.

Siri Is Running on a Licensed Gemini Model

Apple’s newsroom copy never names Google. The rebuilt assistant is “powered by Apple Intelligence,” with Apple Foundation Models on the device and Private Cloud Compute for heavier work. Apple says personal data is not stored there and is not available to Apple or anyone else, and it still calls Siri the world’s most private digital assistant.

The model doing the hard reasoning is a custom Gemini build. People familiar with the talks have described a license of about $1 billion a year for a 1.2-trillion-parameter model. Simple requests stay on the iPhone. Heavier ones go to Apple’s private cloud, where Apple says the contract bars Google from training on the traffic.

SIRI AI AT A GLANCE

Licensed brain: A custom Gemini model, described as 1.2 trillion parameters, at about $1 billion a year.
On-device claim: Apple Foundation Models handle lighter work on the phone, with Private Cloud Compute for the rest.
Language start: English in beta first, then French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish in October.
Hardware floor: iPhone 16 or later, plus iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max, with matching iPad, Mac, Watch, and Vision Pro cuts.

iOS 27 also lets a user pick a third-party model, such as Claude or ChatGPT, to power some Apple Intelligence features. Apple has said it will not take responsibility for what those outside models produce. The company that spent Wednesday arguing it is the best-placed firm for personal AI is, in practice, renting a Google model, offering a menu of other people’s models, and waiting on Google’s mail app to make “search my email” mean the inbox many people actually open.

300,000 Apps and a Thin Handshake

A six-figure app count is easy to stage and hard to inspect. App Intents can expose a single action, such as play this title, add this item, or send this text, without exposing the archive behind it. That is how WhatsApp can appear in a keynote as a send target while Siri still cannot rummage the family group chat.

FROM WWDC TO THE IPHONE EVENT

June 8, 2026: Apple introduces Siri AI at WWDC, with the coconut-cookie demo running through Messages.
WWDC 2026 week: Apple deprecates SiriKit and makes App Intents the way Siri AI calls into a third-party app.
First week of September 2026: An early developer build cannot search Gmail or WhatsApp.
Sept. 8, 2026: That preview gap is described in public, with Google, Meta, and Amazon offering no plans.
Sept. 9, 2026: The Surprise and Shine event names WhatsApp, Outlook, and other apps as action partners and repeats the personal-context pitch.

The 300,000 figure and the Gmail hole can both be true. One counts apps that declared at least one action. The other asks whether Siri can see the two inboxes that hold most of a person’s life. Apple’s June line that third-party personal context depends on Spotlight integration is the quieter sentence. It puts the burden on Gmail and WhatsApp, which have every reason to stall.

iOS 27 Ships With Those Inboxes Still Closed

Apple is putting Siri AI rolling out in beta with iOS 27 on iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max, and on older phones that meet the Apple Intelligence cut. Pre-orders for the new Pro phones begin Sept. 12, with availability on Sept. 18. The assistant is English-only at first. It will not be available initially in the EU on iOS, iPadOS, or watchOS, though Mac and Apple Vision Pro users there can use it in a supported language. It will not ship in China while Apple works through local rules.

None of those limits is the Gmail problem. A user in the United States, on an iPhone 18 Pro, on launch week, can still ask Siri to find a thread that lives in Gmail and get nothing back. The same user can send a WhatsApp if Meta wired that action, and still fail to search the chat history that made the June demo look easy.

The English beta will let Siri draft in Mail, find an iMessage, and act on whatever App Intents a developer actually shipped. It will still need Google to open Gmail before “search my email” means the inbox most people use.