iOS 27: All The New Features

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Need-to-knows

• iOS 27 arrives in September 2026
• Public beta expected July 2026
• Compatible with every iPhone that runs iOS 26 (iPhone 11 and later), the widest rollout Apple has ever offered
• The biggest headliner is a completely rebuilt Siri AI
• Apps load up to 30% faster, Photos library up to 70% faster

Apple unveiled iOS 27 at WWDC 2026 on 8th June, and it’s landing with a lot more power than previous generations. If iOS 26 was about redecorating the house with Liquid Glass, iOS 27 is about making it smarter, faster, and more useful to live in.

The headline feature is Siri and t’s been a long time coming. Craig Federighi said on stage that “privacy in AI is non-negotiable,” and that framing matters, because the new Siri is powered partly by Google Gemini under the hood, and Apple was clearly keen to reassure users that the data handling remains uber secure. Whether that reassurance lands is another conversation, but the capability jump is hard to argue with.

Alongside Siri, there are serious performance improvements, a polished-up Liquid Glass design with new customisation options, an upgraded Photos app, smarter dictation, better parental controls, and new health tracking features. Not a bad list, let’s dive in.

Siri AI: A whole new app

For years, Apple’s been promising a smarter Siri. In iOS 27, it’s finally arrived. You can summon it by holding the power button as before, swiping down from the Dynamic Island, or through the new dedicated Siri app. However you get there, what you find on the other side is genuinely different. Here’s what the new Siri can do:

• Personal context: draws on your Messages, Photos, Mail, and Notes, so “that document Sarah sent me” actually means something to it
• On-screen awareness: see a restaurant in Safari and ask Siri to book a table without copying and pasting a thing
• Cross-app actions: edit a recently sent message, add a song to a playlist, move an email attachment to a project folder, all via natural language
• Web search: Siri can now look things up in real time rather than just telling you it doesn’t know
• Third-party AI extensions: Gemini, Claude, and others can plug in via a new Extensions system if you have them installed

The standalone Siri app looks and feels a lot more like ChatGPT than anything Apple has shipped before: scrollable conversation history, the ability to attach images or files, and options to search through past queries.

More here: Siri in iOS 27

One catch worth flagging: Siri AI is launching in the US first. Its rollout in the EU and China has been delayed by regulatory procedures in both territories, so if you’re outside the States, you may be waiting longer than September.

Performance improvements

Apple is making a notable claim this year: iOS 27 will run on every device currently running iOS 26, including all iPhones back to the iPhone 11. That’s the broadest iOS compatibility ever announced. And rather than just maintaining the status quo on older hardware, Apple says it’s actively making things faster across the board.

The numbers Apple is quoting:

• Apps launch up to 30% faster
• Photos library loads up to 70% more quickly
• AirDrop transfers up to 80% faster
• External storage file transfers up to 5x quicker
• Smarter CPU scheduling for smoother multitasking

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If you’re on an iPhone 11, 12, or 13 and things have been feeling sluggish, iOS 27 seems worth installing for the performance work alone.

Liquid Glass gets a transparency slider

iOS 26 introduced the translucent Liquid Glass aesthetic and…reactions were mixed. iOS 27 doesn’t abandon it (Apple is clearly committed to this direction) but it does give users more control. There’s now a system-wide transparency slider that runs from Ultra Clear at one end to Tinted Glass at the other, so you can dial in exactly how much glass effect you want. App icons and interface elements also get a more layered, three-dimensional treatment.

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Apple has also added a simpler setting to reduce visual intensity for better readability. It’s essentially an acknowledgment that not everyone found Liquid Glass easy to read at the default settings, without Apple having to officially admit that.

Photos App: Proper AI editing tools

The Photos app gets some of the most meaningful feature additions in iOS 27. Three new AI tools stand out:

• Spatial Reframe: change the perspective of a photo as if you’d physically moved the camera when you took it; useful for rescuing shots where the composition was slightly off
• Extend: generatively expands the borders of an image, adding more scene around the edges or adjusting the aspect ratio
• Clean Up (upgraded): more realistic object removal and better background infilling than before

Image Playground also gains photorealistic image generation, though how much you can use it will depend on your iCloud storage tier. Custom Lock Screen images and Contact Posters can be created directly from it too.

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Spotlight, Photos, Mail, and Messages also benefit from a rebuilt search foundation, which Apple says will find things you know are there but couldn’t previously locate through search.

Smarter Dictation and Shortcuts

Dictation on iOS 27 is a proper upgrade. The new systemwide experience automatically adds punctuation and corrects capitalisation, but it also removes filler words like “um” and “er” and reformats text based on context. That last part is the interesting bit: a quick voice note formatted differently to a formal email, all handled automatically.

Shortcuts gets a natural language interface. Instead of building automations with visual blocks, you can just describe what you want to happen in plain English and the AI will construct it. That should remove the biggest barrier to Shortcuts adoption, which has always been the learning curve.

Parental Controls and Health

Apple has expanded the parental control toolkit significantly. Parents can now set app, call, and website restrictions with more granularity than before. Children under 13 will default to Ask to Buy and Ask to Browse, which limits what they can access without parental approval.

On the health side, iOS 27 adds dedicated perimenopause and menopause tracking to the Cycle Tracking app, with personalised insights and recommendations. Apple has described this as a significant expansion into a demographic that digital health tools have historically underserved.

AirPods and Other Updates

Custom EQ presets are coming to AirPods, a feature users have been asking for, for years. You’ll be able to create and save your own sound profiles rather than relying entirely on Apple’s adaptive presets. Apple Maps also gets a significant visual makeover for Flyover mode. iCloud Shared Albums get improvements, there are new accessibility enhancements throughout, and Apple is promising general battery life improvements and system polish.

All of that EQ, worth it? AirPods Max 2 review

iOS 27 Compatibility and Release Date

iOS 27 supports all iPhones currently running iOS 26, covering every model back to the iPhone 11 series. The developer beta is available now, following the WWDC keynote. A public beta is expected in July 2026. The official release will arrive in September 2026, alongside the iPhone 18 lineup.

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The Big Picture

iOS 27 is Apple closing a gap. Siri has lagged behind Google Assistant and the AI chatbot generation for years, and the features being touted here (contextual awareness, cross-app actions, a standalone chat interface) are things that will bring it mostly up to speed.

The performance improvements on older hardware are a nice surprise. So is the Liquid Glass transparency slider, which suggests Apple is listening to criticism. Whether the Siri AI reality matches the WWDC demo is the big question, and the honest answer is we won’t know until September.