Widely perceived as having fallen behind in the high-stakes AI race, Apple is expected to make a renewed bid to catch up with competitors at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) slated from June 9 to June 13.
The iPhone-maker’s AI reboot will include letting third-party developers build on top of its smaller, in-house AI models, according to a report by Bloomberg. The new framework will also let developers integrate its flagship AI offering, Apple Intelligence, across their apps.
While Apple looks to ramp up its long-term AI strategy to win over users, major Indian developers have said that they are already collaborating with the tech giant to integrate existing Apple Intelligence features in the application layer.
Online food delivery platform Swiggy has said it relies on Apple’s machine learning-based Translation API that was announced in iOS 18 last year.
“Apple’s in-app translations let you translate from English to any language without using any third-party libraries. So, for our food menu, which is very textual, we used Apple’s APIs to translate those text to Hindi language,” Agam Mahajan, iOS developer and engineering lead at Swiggy, told indianexpress.com at a recent virtual developer showcase organised by Apple.
Mahajan also revealed that Swiggy Instamart leveraged Apple’s Vision frameworks to develop its popular Shopping List feature that lets users upload their handwritten shopping lists to create a cart with those items on the app.
Swiggy has also developed a new feature (in beta) around Apple’s Image Playground API. This feature lets users prompt for AI-generated images to be used as the profile picture for their accounts. “We are also using Siri intents so that the search on Siri can be more personalised to the end consumer,” Mahajan said.
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Beyond e-commerce, Apple is also enabling Indian developers to roll out AI-focused content creation tools. LightX is one such graphic design and image editing app developed by Noida-based AndOr Communications.
“We currently have 7.55 million downloads globally and we have a 4.7 rating based on 1,38,000 users’ experiences,” said Sharad Shankar, the founder and CEO of AndOr Communications. In 2024, India emerged as the largest market for AI app downloads, contributing 21 per cent of total downloads globally, according to data provided by SensorTower. Eight out of the ten highest grossing graphic design apps on the App Store in India have AI in the name, which is indicative of the surging popularity of AI-based creative apps.
“When we started our company around December 2015 as AndOr, we realised that smartphones are getting more and more powerful, and we wanted to build something similar to Photoshop. We also realised that people are going to create more content through their smartphones. That is why we developed LightX,” Shankar, an IIT Kanpur graduate, told indianexpress.com.
LightX provides users with a suite of tools for graphic design as well as photo editing and video editing. When it was first rolled out, LightX was a paid app that was priced differently in different territories. It saw nearly 1.2 million downloads and with a 4.7 rating, LightX was ranked at the 16th spot in the App Store in the US and at the 17th spot in a few European countries as well.
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However, the company has since pivoted to a subscription-based business model as it was no longer “financially viable for us to keep building features just for $3 or so,” as per Shankar.
It has also moved beyond offering common photo editing tasks like crop, resize, image cleanup, and touch-up. “We have started investing more and more energy towards building AI tools. We now have a suite of AI offerings where users can take a picture of a person, change the outfit or hairstyle of the person, and even create a professional-looking headshot,” Shankar said, adding that users can also create AI-generated, Ghibli style animated images and cartoon caricatures using the app.
It is also working on a semantic photo editor, where users can dictate changes to photos. Its graphic design solutions have also been revamped to be more AI-oriented, providing AI-generated birthday cards, for example.
Citing the high cost of building foundational models, Shankar revealed that LightX is built on top of open-source AI models like Stability Diffusion whose outputs are fine tuned based on user requirements. He added that LightX utilises Apple’s core graphics engine and vision libraries in order to enhance its creative AI features by detecting faces, recognising poses, and removing the background from images.
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The App Store has also been a great facilitator for us, Shankar said, especially when it comes to featuring us for different events like Holi and Diwali in India.
In terms of guardrails, LightX has a backend filter which disallows any kind of NSFW content. “If there is any amount of nudity that we find in photos, we completely block it and we relay an error message. That is kind of very strict because we have constant guidelines from Apple as well as Google. They don’t allow you to generate such content,” Shankar said.
When asked if the AI-modified images on LightX carry any labels, invisible watermarks, or hidden identifiers in the metadata, Shankar said that they would be happy to undertake such provenance efforts if there was some kind of regulation that demanded it.