Siri AI Skips the EU in iOS 27. Here's What Still Reads Text From Your Photos

On June 8, 2026, Apple published a short newsroom post with a long title: Due to DMA, Siri AI delayed in EU for iOS 27 and iPadOS 27. The relevant sentence is blunt. Because of the Digital Markets Act, Apple “will not be able to ship Siri AI in the European Union.”

The coverage that followed was mostly accurate and occasionally not. A few outlets rounded it off to “the EU doesn’t get Visual Intelligence,” which isn’t what Apple said. The distinction matters if you’re trying to work out whether your phone is about to get worse.

Short version: it isn’t. Something you were going to get is being withheld. That’s a different thing, and for the specific job of pulling text off a photo, it changes almost nothing.

What Apple actually said

Here’s the list, verbatim, of what EU users won’t have access to:

the new dedicated app to revisit conversations, an expanded Visual Intelligence experience, integrated tools for writing, Siri mode in Camera on iOS

Four things. Note the word expanded in front of Visual Intelligence. Apple’s own Apple Intelligence page carries the same framing in a footnote: “Siri AI will not initially be available in the EU on iOS, iPadOS and watchOS.”

Two details in Apple’s wording are worth pausing on.

This is about new features, not removal. The announcement is written entirely in the future tense about capabilities arriving with iOS 27. Apple describes Siri AI as “an entirely new version of Siri, powered by Apple Intelligence.” That is a new product sitting on top of the Apple Intelligence layer that already shipped in the EU. Nothing in the announcement says existing features are being pulled.

There’s no date. Apple states it does “not currently have a timeline for Siri AI’s availability on iOS and iPadOS in the EU.” Not a quarter, not a year. If you read a headline promising Siri AI in the EU by some specific month, that number came from somewhere other than Apple.

What this changes for reading text off a photo

Very little, and the reason is that text recognition on iPhone was never part of Apple Intelligence.

Live Text arrived in 2021. It runs on Apple’s Vision framework, processes on the device, and is not gated on Apple Intelligence, Siri AI, or your region. Long-press a photo of a menu in Lisbon and you’ll get the same selectable text a user in Chicago gets. The DMA situation doesn’t touch it.

Same for the document scanner built into Notes and Files, and the scanning in the Preview app that arrived with iOS 26. Same for third-party OCR apps, which mostly call the same Vision APIs Apple’s own features do.

What EU users don’t get is the newer, Siri-mediated layer on top: asking Siri conversational follow-up questions about what the camera sees, the Camera-based Siri mode, the writing tools integration. If your workflow was going to be “point the camera at a contract and ask Siri to summarise the payment terms,” that’s the thing that isn’t coming.

If your workflow is “get the text out of this image so I can paste it somewhere,” you were never waiting on Siri AI.

What still works in the EU, ranked by how little effort it takes

Live Text, free, already on your phone. Long-press text in any photo, or tap the text-selection icon in the bottom corner of the viewfinder. It handles printed text well. It’s the correct first choice and most people should stop here.

Where it stops being enough: it works on one image at a time, keeps no history, and Apple supports a limited set of languages for recognition, considerably fewer than the number of languages people actually photograph documents in. If you work in Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Greek or anything in Cyrillic, check it against your own documents before relying on it.

The Preview app scanner, free, iOS 26 and later. Good for multi-page documents, and it produces a PDF. It’s a document scanner, not a text-extraction tool, so what you get out the other end is a file rather than a paragraph you can paste.

A dedicated OCR app when you need batch processing, a searchable history of what you’ve scanned, structured output rather than a wall of text, or a language Live Text doesn’t cover.

I build Textora, so treat that last paragraph with the appropriate suspicion. It’s free, requires no account, and processes on-device, which is also why the DMA question never arises for it. There’s no cloud service to regulate and no regional feature gate to fall on the wrong side of. That’s not cleverness on my part, it’s a consequence of a design decision made for privacy reasons that happened to age well.

Where it loses: if what you need is a flattened, OCR-layered PDF to upload to a court e-filing portal, a bank’s document intake, or a tax authority’s submission form, Textora doesn’t produce one. Adobe Scan and Acrobat do, and there’s no way around that. For a lot of European administrative work, that is the job, and I’d rather say so here than have you find out after downloading.

The thing worth actually worrying about

Not the feature gap. The uncertainty.

Apple’s phrasing — “not currently have a timeline” — is the kind of language companies use when the outcome depends on a negotiation they don’t control. The DMA compliance question is live, and Apple has been visibly unhappy about it. This could resolve in six months or it could sit unresolved through another iOS cycle.

If you’re an EU user making a decision about tooling, the sensible read is: don’t build a workflow around a feature Apple hasn’t committed to shipping to you. Build it around what’s on your phone today. If Siri AI arrives later, that’s an upgrade rather than a rescue.

What I’d tell a friend in Berlin

Use Live Text. It’s free, it’s already there, and for most photos it’s the right answer.

If you find yourself scanning more than a handful of documents a week, or working in a language Apple’s recognition doesn’t cover well, add a dedicated OCR app. Test it on your own documents first, specifically the ugly ones: the thermal receipts and the handwritten notes, because that’s where apps separate. Any app that looks good on a clean A4 printout is telling you nothing.

And ignore the headlines saying Europe lost Visual Intelligence. Europe didn’t get an expanded version of it. That’s worth knowing and it isn’t worth panicking about.

I build Textora, a free on-device OCR app. Every factual claim in this post links to a primary source, and I’ve named the case where a competitor does the job better. If something here is wrong, email me at support@textora.app and I’ll correct the post and note what changed.

Sources: Apple Newsroom, June 8, 2026 · Apple Intelligence