Apple’s Image Playground and Genmoji features reportedly on track for iOS 18.2 beta – 9to5Mac

In the latest edition of the Power On newsletter, Mark Gurman reported that Apple is going to begin releasing their image generation features in iOS 18.2 later this year. If history is to be followed, we should see the first beta ship in October, with the final release occurring in December.

The release timeframe for Apple’s image generation features was a bit up in the air, as the company didn’t include Genmoji nor Image Playground in the any of the existing iOS 18.1 betas. This led many to speculate on why the image generation features were seemingly delayed, and many were wondering if we’d even see the features ship this year. However, we now have an answer.

According to Gurman, the feature set will begin shipping in iOS 18.2, including both the new Image Playground app and Genmoji. This is another big step forward for the Apple Intelligence rollout, although the all new Siri with personal context is still expected to ship in iOS 18.4 in next spring.

Another missing Apple Intelligence feature is ChatGPT support, both in Siri and across the system. However, Apple CEO Tim Cook reassured us that the feature would be available later this year, likely in iOS 18.2.

Image Playground is a new Apple tool, which will be able to generate all sorts of “creative” AI images. There are three styles: Animation, Illustration, and Sketch. Notably, Image Playground doesn’t support photorealistic generation, likely for the better. You can learn more about Image Playground here.

Genmoji on the other hand allows users to generate custom emojis based on a quick prompt, allowing you to express your feelings in a way that the unicode emoji standard simply doesn’t allow. You’ll be able to use Genmoji inline with your text, making them appear similar to normal emojis.

Apple is also providing APIs for developers to properly support Genmoji in their apps. By default, Genmoji in an unsupported app will just upload as an image, rather than looking like an emoji.

Apple unveiled their Apple Intelligence feature set at WWDC24 back in June, although the features weren’t available in the initial iOS 18.0 betas. In late July, we got reports that the feature set would be delayed until iOS 18.1 in October, and the first iOS 18.1 beta released promptly after that, where we got our hands on Writing Tools, Notification Summaries, and more.

To run Apple Intelligence features on your device, you’ll need an iPhone 15 Pro or later, or any iPad or Mac with an M1 chip or later. iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro are also both expected to support Apple Intelligence, as the base model is likely to have 8GB of RAM.

Are you excited for Image Playground or Genmoji? Let us know in the comments.

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