Apple’s Image Playground might be about to get a Nano Banana boost (www.techradar.com)

Newly discovered code in the iOS 26 beta suggests Apple may open its Image Playground to third‑party image generators. The strings spotted by 9to5Mac add provider identifiers and an “estimated latency” field, which imply a pluggable backend model where the app could query multiple external services and show expected response times. Today Image Playground only ships with Apple’s own LLM and a ChatGPT integration, so this change would let users tap alternative image‑generation APIs without leaving the native app. That matters because it could bring leading text‑to‑image and image‑editing models—like Google’s Gemini Nano Banana—directly into iPhone, iPad and Mac workflows. Nano Banana is notable for high‑quality text‑to‑image synthesis and robust editing tools; integrating it natively would significantly expand Image Playground’s creative capabilities and accelerate Apple Intelligence’s competitiveness. Technically, provider identifiers point to a more modular architecture (routing, latency estimation, possibly fallbacks), while the new UI signals a focus on user experience for multi‑provider selection. Nothing is confirmed yet, but if Apple ships this, it would be a major step toward a more open, multi‑vendor AI ecosystem on Apple platforms and could shape how on‑device and cloud models are balanced for latency, privacy and capability.