Apple Kills SiriKit: Developers Have a Migration Deadline to the Gemini-Powered Siri

By Hector Herrera | June 8, 2026 | Work

Apple officially deprecated SiriKit at WWDC 2026, ending a nine-year run as the developer framework for Siri integrations and replacing it with App Intents. The move is a direct consequence of Apple's decision to rebuild Siri on a custom Google Gemini backend — and it starts a migration clock for every iOS app that uses voice commands today.

What Changed

SiriKit, introduced in 2016, let developers register app actions — booking a ride, sending a message, starting a workout — that Siri could trigger on a user's behalf. As of WWDC 2026, SiriKit is deprecated. Apple has not set a hard removal date yet, but SiriKit support will be stripped in a future OS release. "Future" in Apple's language typically means one to two major versions.

App Intents — Apple's newer framework, introduced in 2022 — is now the only supported path for Siri integration. App Intents are more flexible than SiriKit's domain-based system. Where SiriKit required apps to fit into predefined categories (messaging, ride-booking, payments), App Intents lets developers define arbitrary actions that the new Gemini-powered Siri can discover and invoke contextually.

Why It Matters for Developers

This is not a small change. SiriKit integrations are baked into production apps at major companies — Uber, Lyft, WhatsApp, Venmo, Peloton, and dozens of others built their voice command flows on SiriKit domains. Those integrations need to be rewritten in App Intents before Apple pulls the plug.

The migration is not trivial. SiriKit was structured around INIntent classes and INInteraction objects. App Intents uses a completely different Swift-based API built around the AppIntent protocol. Teams that built SiriKit integrations in Objective-C face an additional language migration on top of the framework change.

What developers need to do:

• Audit every SiriKit domain currently in use (messaging, lists, payments, workouts, ride-booking, media, phone calls)
• Map existing INIntent flows to equivalent App Intents actions
• Test against the new Gemini-backed Siri, which may interpret natural language differently than the old Siri did
• Submit updated apps before the (still-TBD) hard cutoff date

The Bigger Picture

The SiriKit deprecation is not primarily a developer story — it's a signal of Apple's strategic direction. Rebuilding Siri on Gemini required a new architecture, and that new architecture made SiriKit's domain-based model obsolete. App Intents is designed to work with a reasoning-capable AI that can figure out what the user wants; SiriKit was designed for a pattern-matching system that needed the categories pre-labeled.

For the iOS app ecosystem, this is the first major developer-facing disruption tied directly to Apple's AI pivot. It won't be the last. As the Gemini-powered Siri becomes more capable, Apple will likely expand what App Intents can do — and deprecate more legacy frameworks that predate the AI-native stack.

Watch for: The specific SiriKit domain removal timeline in Apple's updated developer documentation this week. Apps in highly regulated categories — banking, healthcare, payments — will want that date confirmed before committing engineering resources to the migration.