Why Gmail and WhatsApp Still Don’t Work With Apple’s New Siri

Apple’s rebuilt Siri is nearing the iOS 27 release window, but its most ambitious promise—acting as a personal assistant across the apps people use every day—has a practical dependency: third-party developers must connect their apps to it. As of early September, Gmail and WhatsApp were not compatible with an early Siri AI version available to developers, and Siri reportedly said it could not locate WhatsApp messages because it lacked access to the service. 1

The short version: Siri cannot search data it has not been given access to

A conversational interface or more capable model does not automatically grant Siri access to email, messages, bookings, documents, or other information held inside third-party apps. An app must explicitly make selected actions and data available through Apple’s integration framework.

That distinction explains the WhatsApp example. If WhatsApp has not exposed messages or a message-search action to Siri, Siri cannot retrieve them. This is primarily an access and integration boundary, rather than evidence that Siri failed to understand the request. 1

The same constraint affects bigger workflows. A request that spans multiple apps can succeed only where the required apps expose the relevant capabilities and where Siri can use them safely and reliably.

App Intents is the new integration layer

Apple’s modern route for connecting an app to Siri and other system experiences is App Intents. The framework lets an iOS app expose actions and data that Siri AI and Apple Intelligence can invoke on a user’s behalf; it also connects apps with surfaces such as Shortcuts, Spotlight, and widgets. 5

For developers, this is more than adding a voice-command shortcut. They need to define the actions their app supports, model the relevant entities and parameters, and maintain the integration as the product changes. Apple’s developer materials also include mechanisms for indicating when an entity is public or shared, illustrating how app-provided context needs explicit structure and privacy-aware metadata. 2

Industry guidance describing the iOS 27 transition says SiriKit has been deprecated in favor of App Intents, with the latter becoming the path for Siri AI to call into third-party apps. 6 In effect, an app that wants to participate in the new Siri experience must decide what Siri can discover, retrieve, and do—and implement that decision deliberately.

Why major platforms may be slow to participate

It is not yet clear whether today’s non-participating apps will connect to Siri AI. 1 But there are straightforward reasons adoption may take time:

• Engineering and quality work: Developers need to build, test, and maintain structured intents for actions that may be invoked in many different user contexts.
• Security and privacy decisions: Exposing an action or entity to a system assistant requires careful limits on what can be read, changed, or shared.
• Product control: A third-party service has to decide whether it wants an Apple-controlled assistant to become a prominent entry point for its service.
• Competitive incentives: Companies with their own AI assistants may prefer to keep users inside their own products and interaction models rather than make their services interchangeable through a rival platform’s assistant.

These are plausible business and technical trade-offs, not proof that any particular company will refuse integration permanently.

What this means for Siri’s AI ambitions

Apple can improve Siri’s language understanding, conversation flow, and ability to coordinate tasks. But those improvements do not remove the app-access problem. Siri is only able to use personal context across apps when the relevant services provide supported, structured access through App Intents. 5

That creates an uneven near-term experience. Siri may be most useful in Apple’s own apps and in third-party apps that adopt the framework well, while remaining limited in high-frequency categories such as email and messaging when major services do not participate. The reported Gmail and WhatsApp gaps are therefore important: they demonstrate that assistant quality and ecosystem coverage are separate challenges. 1

The practical takeaway for users and developers

For users, a polished Siri response should not be mistaken for universal access to every app. Whether it can find a message, retrieve a detail, or complete a multi-step task depends on the individual apps involved.

For developers, App Intents is the key product surface to evaluate. The useful question is not merely whether an app supports Siri, but which specific actions and entities it exposes, what permissions and safeguards apply, and whether those capabilities are reliable enough for an assistant to execute on a user’s behalf. 25

Siri’s next phase may be defined as much by those integration choices as by the AI behind it.