The reality is that almost nobody actually wants LLMs in their phones.
They're not good enough for that usecase, currently - so almost all interactions make the UX worse, currently.
Might change in the future, I'm just taking about today in January 2026
> The reality is that almost nobody actually wants LLMs in their phones.
I don’t think that’s true. People just use the LLM apps. What people don’t feel like they need right now is deep LLM integration across the whole OS. IMO, that’s more of just not showing people the killer product yet.
Live translation? Circle to search? All the magic reframing and relighting stuff in the camera app? I don't know how good the Apple equivalents are, but those are all deeply integrated into Android and are used pretty heavily as far as I can see.
I don't often use voice assistants myself, but they're fully conversational these days and several billion times more useful than the old-school Alexa-style stuff with a limited set of integrations.
I strongly agree with this. Frankly even ChatGPT 3.5 could do better. I am baffled that Apple has stuck so stubbornly to whatever insane architecture they have that results in my daily cornucopia of "I'm sorry, I didn't understand" as well as own goals like it forgetting that Apple Music is the only music service I have, or calling a girl I haven't seen in 20 years instead of my wife who has the same first name.
I am also baffled that how common I do something never updates the model. I often use Siri to start a playlist while running but had to rename them because Siri would play some unknown to me public playlist instead of what would seem to me be the highest likelihood target - my own
I think this is the wrong framing. Nobody cares whether there's an LLM in their phone. What people do want is features like improved Siri (still, debatable beyond setting timers) or other improvements, that could potentially come from LLMs.... if they actually work. So far other providers (such as Amazon Alexa) have struggled to deliver a reliable voice assistant powered by LLMs.