Qwen will run inside the operating system of China-market iPhones from iPhone 15 Pro onward, giving Alibaba consumer reach that does not depend on users downloading its app.
Apple Intelligence is coming to iPhones in mainland China, and Alibaba’s Qwen will sit inside it. In a release on its China newsroom dated October 31, Apple said the first set of Apple Intelligence features for iPhone will be available to test in the latest iOS developer beta from November 4, with a public release in iOS 27.3 in December. Apple said it had partnered with Alibaba to add Qwen support to some of those features. Alibaba announced the partnership the same day, according to Xinhua.
The announcement settles a question that has hung over Apple’s China business for more than two years. Apple first presented Apple Intelligence in 2024, but the features never launched on the mainland. In July, China’s cyberspace regulator completed filings for seven on-device generative AI services for smartphones, Apple Intelligence among them, Xinhua reported. EastFrontier reported in October that updated network-access permits already showed Apple’s China AI path running through Alibaba’s Qwen. What was missing until now was a date and a feature list from Apple itself.
Some limits remain. The China release covers iPhone only, and it leaves out Siri AI, the rebuilt assistant Apple introduced at WWDC 2026.
Qwen handles requests inside Siri, Writing Tools and Visual Intelligence
Apple’s release describes Qwen support across three parts of the system. Siri can call on Qwen for certain requests, including questions about photos and about documents such as PDFs and presentations. Writing Tools gains a Compose function in which Qwen writes original content from scratch. Visual Intelligence, which identifies objects and places through the iPhone camera, also draws on Qwen for text and image understanding. Users reach Qwen by signing in with a Qwen account or with Sign in with Apple, the release says.
Alibaba set out the privacy terms. Users can choose whether to turn on the Qwen integration and what information to share, and Alibaba said it will not use user requests or generated responses to train its models, Xinhua reported. Eligibility covers people who bought an Apple Intelligence-capable iPhone in China, or whose device location and Apple Account country or region are both set to China.
The rest of the first wave consists of features users elsewhere have had for some time. Apple lists Live Translation in Messages, FaceTime and Phone, Genmoji, the Clean Up tool and natural-language search in Photos, notification summaries, priority notifications, Smart Reply, mail summaries and Type to Siri. Apple lists English and Simplified Chinese as the supported Siri and device languages.
The China edition trails Apple’s global software by a full generation
9to5Mac noted that iOS 27.2, released October 26, extended Siri AI to French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish, while Siri AI remains unavailable in China. MacRumors added that Image Playground will not be offered in China either, and that Apple Intelligence will not reach Mac, iPad or other devices there until Apple receives further approvals. Apple’s own release says only that support for other platforms will follow once the necessary approvals are in place, without a timetable.
Apple’s own announcement lists iPhone 16 and later models, iPhone Duo, iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max and iPhone Air as the supported devices. That is the installed base Qwen gains access to through the operating system, rather than through an app users must download.
For Alibaba, the deal carries weight beyond Apple. Alibaba Group chief executive Eddie Wu said Qwen will integrate into Apple’s ecosystem and work with Apple to deliver new AI services to Chinese users, according to Xinhua. Wang Xiaojie, an AI researcher at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, told Xinhua it is the first time a top global consumer hardware maker has used a Chinese large model as its primary system-level AI backbone in the Chinese market. Neither Apple nor Alibaba disclosed financial terms.
The November 4 beta is the first hands-on test
Apple’s China release gives November 4 for the developer beta, which MacRumors said likely means November 3 in the United States because of the time difference. Developers will be the first to see how requests pass between Apple’s on-device processing and Alibaba’s Qwen, and how clearly the permission prompts explain what leaves the phone.
The December release of iOS 27.3 will put the features in front of ordinary users during the holiday quarter, when Apple competes directly with Huawei and other domestic brands that have offered AI features for years. The next markers are an approval that extends Apple Intelligence to Mac and iPad in China, and any sign that Apple plans to bring Siri AI to the mainland, which would test whether Qwen’s role grows beyond the features listed now.