Apple’s Image Playground doesn’t suck anymore

Have you ever used the Image Playground app on your iPhone? Probably not — and you might not even know that your phone has a built-in AI image generation tool. That’s because until now, Image Playground has kind of sucked, generating AI imagery that simply isn’t as high-quality as what Apple’s competitors can make. At WWDC 2026 on Monday, Apple announced some necessary improvements to Image Playground.

While we haven’t yet gotten to use the app, Apple’s presentation makes it seem like the company’s overall AI overhaul will make Apple Intelligence-powered apps, like Image Playground, perform a lot better.

“From stunning nature scenes to fun images using multiple people from your Photos library, you can also transform your photos into endless styles just by describing what you want in natural language, and with private cloud compute, your photos are never stored or shared, even with Apple,” said Apple Senior Director Leslie Ikemoto in a WWDC presentation.

As an example, Ikemoto explained that if you’re throwing a birthday party for your friend, you can design an invitation by using Image Playground to create an image of your friend holding a cake. Then, you can use natural language prompting to add candles to the cake or change your friend’s outfit.