WWDC'25 is DOA: Google won the AI war before it even began
Gemini enjoys explosive growth and quick rollouts, while Apple is scrambling for relevance.
This article may contain personal views and opinion from the author.
The AI race is over before it even started for real.
Google nipped Apple's AI advances in the bud and effectively made the upcoming WWDC'25 developer summit largely irrelevant. While Apple has shown that it's largely incapable of developing anything relevant in the field of AI and is struggling to even revamp the Siri assistant, the Sundar Pichai-led search giant just took an enormous lead forward in the AI sphere by announcing some awe-inspiring Gemini tools and functionalities.
Google I/O 2025 was outstanding
Yesterday, Google's I/O 2025 keynote ran for nearly two hours and was all focused on AI, with the term being mentioned nearly a hundred times as per Google's own "AI tracker".
The amount of AIs and Geminis were on a pretty palpable level
Despite that I'm fed up with anything AI-related as much as the next man, I actually enjoyed the show, which was objectively intriguing and insightful. But we are not here to talk about me, as I'm largely irrelevant to pretty much anything AI-related.
We are here to talk about just how ahead of Apple Google currently is, and what a complete slam dunk Google I/O'25 was. And get this––many of the features announced on stage at Google I/O were released immediately. After seeing how many cool and useful new features and functionalities are coming to Google's Gemini suite, I feel preliminary second-hand embarrassment for Apple.
Apple is playing with sticks while Google is building nukes
Now, it's like comparing apples to oranges as Apple isn't really in the LLM business, while Google is, so it isn't probably isn't morally correct to compare Google's vast Gemini portfolio against the rather bare-bones Apple Intelligence. The former is more of a platform, while Cupertino's initial AI push was deemed more of a belated quality-of-life update to iOS that simply had to happen so that iPhones don't fall much behind.
With that in mind, comparing the colorful Genmoji available on the latest iPhones against the powerful, industry-leading capabilities of the Gemini 2.5 model feels like a lone jedi going against the Death Star proper with a malfunctioning lightsaber. A mission impossible!
But then again, why shouldn't we do just that? Why shouldn't we compare one company's advances against another technological giant's curious inability to deliver anything exciting in the field?
Apple hasn't dabbed into the LLM field yet (and maybe never will) as it is apparently still struggling to decide what Apple Intelligence should be and what iPhone users would benefit from in terms of built-in AI features, so we should
At this point, even ahead of WWDC'25, I find it challenging to be remotely excited about anything Apple Intelligence related as it would certainly fail to match the scope and capabilities that Google's Gemini has already achieved.
Gemini on the iPhone? Gemini on the iPhone.
The best course of action for Apple? Honestly, at this point, it doesn't feel like Apple should bother at all. Instead of struggling to develop a more powerful Siri in-house, which is apparently a challenging task for a trillion-dollar company, it would be wiser for Cupertino to strike a deal with Google and make Siri tap into Gemini's powerful resources.
There's already a precedent: ChatGPT support for Siri already arrived with iOS 18.2, allowing one-click access to one of the first AI chatbots out there. Allowing iPhone users to do that natively but with Gemini instead would be a massive win for everyone.
But why wait for Apple and Google to mull over the details as you can already use Gemini on your iPhone, even talk to Gemini Live and share your screen and camera with the app. You can even map the Gemini app to the Action Button for quick access! That's pretty much what Siri should have been by now, but alas, it wasn't destined to be.
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