I can’t believe so many iPhone users still have this pointless app installed

Summary

Apple first introduced the Image Playground app in 2024’s iOS 18.2 release.
Image Playground is a first-party app that uses generative AI to create quirky images from text prompts and real-world photos.
I always delete Image Playground as I find its utility to be dubious.

Back in December 2024, Apple unleashed its next phase of AI-based Apple Intelligence features onto compatible devices. Alongside Genmoji, Writing Tools, visual intelligence, and tighter ChatGPT integration, the tech giant made available one other AI-centric addition: Image Playground. The feature, which arrived in the form of a dedicated application for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Vision Pro, is essentially a generative image creator, complete with prompt suggestions and a text input field.

Image Playground, and AI-powered image generation tools more broadly, aren’t new. Google’s Pixel Studio app for Android and Microsoft’s Paint app for Windows offer analogous capabilities, and OpenAI’s Dall-E 2 and 4o Image Generation tools are only getting more powerful by the day. Apple’s Playground app, however, didn’t exactly set the world on fire on release day. Reddit threads across the tech sphere are filled with users complaining of the app’s inadequacy, and, anecdotally, I’ve never seen any of my iPhone-toting friends use the feature in real life.

Apple’s Image Playground app is an odd duck

The app’s gimmicky appeal wears thin within minutes

In my case, once I updated my iPhone to iOS 18.2, I spent a grand total of about 10 minutes playing around with Apple’s Image Playground app. The software interface itself is clean and simple, which is nice, but there’s genuinely not much going on to warrant its pre-installed app status. Apple lets you describe an image via written text, which can be supplemented with pre-configured prompts. These prompts are categorized under themes, costumes, accessories, and places.

The app also lets you select a photo from your camera roll, which you can then “AI-ify” in either an animated style, or in an illustrated style. You can mix and match prompts, text, and images, and the system will generate results on-device (without reaching out to the cloud or requiring internet access). The main home page displays a gallery of all your generated image creations, which can then be edited, shared, copied, or deleted.

On the surface, the app covers all the basics of image generation, and does so with Apple’s signature software UX polish. The animations are pleasant, the pulsing hues of light are somewhat mesmerizing, and there’s a playfulness to the experience that is often lacking in today’s over-saturated market of AI tools. What, then, is the problem with Image Playground, you might be asking? The fact of the matter is that it doesn’t do a good enough job at actually generating images.

…I applaud Apple’s on-device approach to AI generation from a privacy standpoint, but the company’s tech just isn’t good enough to hold down the fort.

Apple appears to be going for a whimsical cartoonish style with its image generation tool, but results are hit-or-miss at the best of times. Unlike some other image generators, which make use of the cloud for access to superior AI models, Apple’s on-device approach is subpar and a bit on the slow side. It takes several seconds to generate just a couple of images, and I always end up with one weirdity or another (my poor snowman creation has a carrot mouth, instead of a carrot nose).

And don’t even get me started on the tool’s AI generation of humans. I plugged several photos of myself into Image Playground, and I was horrified by the results. The app spit out options that were not only inaccurate (I have curly hair, not straight hair), but also genuinely uncanny. In short, then, I applaud Apple’s on-device approach to AI generation from a privacy standpoint, but the company’s tech just isn’t good enough to hold down the fort.

The 8 wildest Genmoji I made with iOS 18.2

Apple’s tool for making custom emoji is fun, and more than a little weird.

AI for the sake of AI

Was anyone asking for the Image Playground app?

All of this raises the question of ‘why.’ Artificial intelligence is seemingly everywhere in 2025, with tech companies both big and small attempting to capitalize on the hype. A sense of AI fatigue has set in for many, and I too have grown increasingly cynical. Some AI tools are genuinely useful — others, like Image Playground, feel more like glorified demos meant to dazzle during commercial breaks, while also appeasing AI-on-the-brain shareholders.

One day several weeks ago, I found myself low on internal iPhone storage. I went into Settings to check out which apps I could delete or archive in order to regain some capacity, and I deleted Image Playground without hesitation. To be honest, I’m surprised more iPhone users haven’t done the same. As mentioned, I’ve never seen anyone use the feature in the real world, despite it being readily available in app form right from the home screen.

To be clear, I’m not rooting for Apple to fail in the AI space. More competition is better than less, and in a world of Meta AI and Google Gemini, Apple’s privacy-conscious approach to computing is a breath of fresh air. I just hope to see Apple Intelligence features — Image Playground included — improve rapidly. Stripping away all the AI buzz, software features still need to be refined and functional in order to prove their worth. If Apple can manage to square its image generation circle, I’ll be open to the idea of re-downloading Playground and giving it another algorithmic whirl.