While I understand why some people are disappointed, I think there are very good reasons for this (not excuses, but reasons). These updates are quite ambitious, and require a lot of work. They seem to possibly have run into unforeseen snags that setback their work on these features. Perhaps security issues arose that weren’t initially a problem. Who knows, but Apple has had their hands quite full with major security fixes they had to roll out in 18.3. And they’ve also had to do a bunch of extra work to satisfy the stupid regulations in places like the EU. Sometimes things come up and set back development. It seems to be last-minute hurdles they’re running into while nearing a working system. It would be analogous to a factory burning down right before a product goes into production, pushing back the production release window. It’s not like it’s premeditated or something. Things can just happen.
Also, we don’t even know yet if these features have actually been delayed to iOS 19. Nothing in that statement from that Apple spokesperson says as much. For all we know, the features could come in iOS 18.5, 18.6, 18.7, etc. We just don’t know yet. So saying there’s “no excuse” for something that hasn’t happened yet doesn’t make much sense to me… For all we know, these features still stand a good chance of rolling out in iOS 18, nothing from Apple has stated otherwise yet…