Apple in Talks With Google to Bring Gemini to iPhone

Apple is in talks with Google to license Gemini and power generative AI features on the iPhone, Bloomberg reported Monday. The company has also spoken with OpenAI. The move suggests that the next major iOS update could make generative AI a visible part of the mobile experience.

The significance goes beyond the technology Apple chooses. For years, the company has built many of its intelligent features into the device, from photo recognition to dictation and text suggestions. Licensing a Google model would amount to an acknowledgment that, for certain conversational and content-generation tasks, Apple also needs to rely on an outside partner.

Gemini could accelerate generative AI's arrival on iOS

Gemini is Google's family of AI models, introduced in December 2023. In February, Google renamed its Bard chatbot Gemini. These systems can draft text, summarize documents, answer questions and work with different types of information, including text, code and photographs. Google had also added image-generation features to Gemini, although it temporarily suspended the creation of images of people in February.

A deal would not necessarily mean that Google's assistant replaces Siri. The more likely arrangement would be to integrate Gemini behind specific iOS features: help drafting messages, summaries of notifications or web pages, more contextual search and answers to complex requests.

Apple has not yet announced those capabilities or finalized a deal. It is also not settled which provider would ultimately power each feature. The talks with OpenAI show that the company is weighing its options in a market where large language models have become a strategic component, comparable to a search engine or payments platform.

Google already holds a privileged position on the iPhone

Google has been Safari's default search engine on a large share of Apple's devices and in many markets for years. The agreement, whose financial details are not disclosed in full, has placed the two companies in an unusual relationship: they compete for users, browsers, advertising and operating systems, but collaborate on one of the iPhone's most widely used services.

Gemini would extend that relationship to a far more sensitive layer: the user's daily interaction with the phone. If granted permission, a generative assistant could access queries, documents, email, calendars or contextual information. Apple would therefore have to determine not only which model delivers the best answers, but also where the data is processed and what controls remain with the user.

Privacy is one of Apple's most frequently repeated selling points. The company has its own chips with a Neural Engine, a component designed to run machine-learning operations directly on the device. That hardware can handle fast, local tasks, while more demanding requests might require remote servers. The combination could limit what information leaves the iPhone, although that would depend on the product's final architecture.

Pressure is coming from Android

The negotiations come after Samsung unveiled its Galaxy S24 lineup with Galaxy AI in January, a suite of features that includes real-time call translation, generative photo editing and writing tools. Google, for its part, has put Gemini at the center of its strategy for Android and its web services.

Apple already uses AI in everyday products, but its offering has been less visible than the chatbots and generative assistants popularized by OpenAI, Google and Microsoft. Bringing these tools to the iPhone would give them a scale that would be difficult to match: the phone is the main digital access point for hundreds of millions of people and holds much of their personal communication.

Apple's next major software event will be its annual developer conference, typically held in June. Until then, the question will be whether the company chooses a single partner, divides functions among several models or keeps the leading role for its own technology. The decision will determine how much control Apple retains over one of the most important transitions in mobile computing since the arrival of voice assistants.