Waiting for Siri 2.0? Apple’s Gemini-powered upgrade reportedly delayed beyond iOS 26.4

Apple’s long-awaited Siri 2.0 update has hit fresh roadblocks during testing, leading the company to delay the feature to upcoming updates, according to a report by Bloomberg. Reportedly, the feature was slated to arrive with the iOS 26.4 update but has now been pushed back to iOS 26.5 or even iOS 27.

What happened with Siri’s latest delay?

Notably, Apple had first announced the overhaul to Siri in 2024 and has since been forced to delay the feature multiple times due to technical issues. Apple fans may have thought that things were finally on the right track when the Cupertino-based tech giant announced it would be using Google’s custom Gemini model for running Apple Intelligence features, including Siri.

The latest issues with Siri were uncovered during the testing phase, where the voice assistant reportedly doesn’t always properly process queries or takes too long to handle certain requests.

The company has reportedly recently begun instructing its engineers to use the upcoming iOS 26.5 update in order to try out the new Siri features, which suggests that the Siri overhaul may have been pushed back by at least one release cycle.

The internal version of the iOS 26.5 update also includes a notice describing some of the additions made to Siri.

Some of the features that are running behind schedule include Siri’s ability to tap into personal data and the app intents feature, which lets the assistant complete multi-step commands. The report notes that support for these features exists in the iOS 26.5 update, but they don’t function reliably in all cases.

The testers have also reportedly found accuracy issues along with a fresh bug that causes Siri to cut off users mid-sentence when they are speaking too quickly. There are also said to be problems handling complex queries which require longer processing times.

Another big issue with Siri is reportedly that it falls back to the ChatGPT integration instead of using Apple’s own technology, and the issue is said to occur even for queries which the assistant should be capable of handling.

The report noted that the internal versions of Siri till late 2025 were so sluggish that people involved in the development believed that Apple would have to delay the update by months.

However, it also noted that Apple executives have been steadfast in their belief that they don’t want the release of the feature to slip past spring 2026.

The good news is that Apple may surprise its users with two new features with the iOS 26.5 update. These are a new web search tool and a custom image generation option.

These features were also said to be tested with the iOS 26.4 update and could potentially be released prior to the overall Siri revamp.

The web search tool will reportedly work similar to Perplexity or Google’s AI Mode by letting users request information from the web and get a synthesised answer with links to relevant websites. Meanwhile, the image generation feature will use the same engine as the Image Playground app that the company had earlier rolled out.