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Remember when Apple blamed EU tech rules — and more specifically the Digital Markets Act — to justify the fact that Apple Intelligence wouldn’t be available in the European Union? Maybe that was just an attempt to turn EU users against their regulators as Apple Intelligence is coming to the EU in April 2025 along with local language support.
Apple just released iOS 18.1 today with the first set of smart features coming to recent iPhone, iPad, and Mac models. However, when Apple unveiled Apple Intelligence at its developer conference back in June, the company said that it would be a slow rollout with new AI features limited to American English at first.
And that’s still the case today. While Apple Intelligence is technically out of beta, you have to set your iPhone or Mac to U.S. English. On the iPhone, Apple also checks if your Apple account is associated with a European address. If that’s the case, you can’t enable Apple Intelligence on your iPhone at all, even if you set your iPhone to U.S. English.
On the Mac, it’s a different story as European users can try out Apple Intelligence features starting today. If you have a Mac with an M1 chip or later, you can change the language and enable Apple Intelligence right away. Observers assumed that’s because Apple has been designated as a gatekeeper under the DMA in relation to iOS, iPadOS, the App Store, and Safari. macOS wasn’t part of that list.
The company previously announced that support for more languages was on the way, starting with localized English support for other countries in December 2024. Apple plans to add another dozen languages throughout 2025, including French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.
However, Apple Intelligence will also be available on the iPhone in the EU in just a few months. “This April, Apple Intelligence features will start to roll out to iPhone and iPad users in the EU. This will include many of the core features of Apple Intelligence, including Writing Tools, Genmoji, a redesigned Siri with richer language understanding, ChatGPT integration, and more,” Apple wrote in a press release.
From this list, it turns out all Apple Intelligence features are coming to the EU, except… priority notifications? We’ve reached out to Apple for more details about what’s not coming to the EU, but it sounds like it’s going to be hard to tell the differences. This leads us to this simple question: what was the issue with the DMA again?
Romain Dillet is a Senior Reporter at TechCrunch. He has written over 3,000 articles on technology and tech startups and has established himself as an influential voice on the European tech scene. He has a deep background in startups, privacy, security, fintech, blockchain, mobile, social and media. With twelve years of experience at TechCrunch, he’s one of the familiar faces of the tech publication that obsessively covers Silicon Valley and the tech industry. In fact, his career started at TechCrunch when he was 21. Based in Paris, many people in the tech ecosystem consider him as the most knowledgeable tech journalist in town. Romain likes to spot important startups before anyone else. He was the first person to cover N26, Revolut and DigitalOcean. He has written scoops on large acquisitions from Apple, Microsoft and Snap. When he’s not writing, Romain is also a developer — he understands how the tech behind the tech works. He also has a deep historical knowledge of the computer industry for the past 50 years. He knows how to connect the dots between innovations and the effect on the fabric of our society. Romain graduated from Emlyon Business School, a leading French business school specialized in entrepreneurship. He has helped several non-profit organizations, such as StartHer, an organization that promotes education and empowerment of women in technology, and Techfugees, an organization that empowers displaced people with technology.
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