Apple could ban cross-app agents

This risk means the winning agent on iPhone may be the one Apple blesses, not the one users like best. On iOS, apps are sandboxed so they cannot freely read from or control other apps, and Apple channels cross app actions through App Intents, Siri, and Shortcuts. That gives Apple a clean security basis for allowing narrow, developer approved actions while blocking broader orchestration layers that try to watch screens, infer state, and act across apps more like an operating system.

• The practical constraint is not just policy, it is product architecture. A normal iPhone app cannot see that Uber is showing one price while Lyft is showing another, because each app is isolated. That is why agent products that want to compare, predict, and act across apps push down toward the OS layer or rely on brittle workarounds.
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• Apple already offers a sanctioned path for automation. Developers can expose specific actions to Siri, Shortcuts, Spotlight, and Apple Intelligence through App Intents. That supports things like sending a message, booking a ride, or starting a task, but only when the underlying app has explicitly wired up the action. Coverage stays narrow and Apple keeps control of the interface.
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• That creates an asymmetry with Android. Android allows deeper experimentation through launchers, assistant replacement, accessibility based overlays, and even OS forks. In the agent market, this makes iPhone a permissioned environment and Android a testing ground for fuller orchestration products like Wafer and /dev/agents.
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The next phase is a split market. On iOS, agent products will increasingly look like developer approved action catalogs inside Apple controlled surfaces. On Android and custom devices, agents will keep moving closer to the OS, where they can actually observe behavior across apps, learn user patterns, and turn apps into back end services instead of destinations.