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?