iOS 27 was announced alongside iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone Duo at Apple's 9 September keynote, and it arrives this month. It is a bigger release than the version number suggests, mostly because it is the first version of iOS built around Apple's rebuilt Siri rather than around a set of new screens.
Here is everything Apple announced, grouped by what it actually does for you.
Siri, rebuilt
The headline feature is a new version of Siri that Apple is calling Siri AI. The short version: it can search your personal context across apps like Mail and Messages, it can see what is on your screen and answer questions about it, and it can take actions inside apps you already use — Apple says over 300,000 of them work with it already.
It also has its own app on the Home Screen now, so a conversation can be revisited, continued, or synced privately between your devices through iCloud.
We have written that up separately, because it is the single biggest change in the release: what actually changed in Siri AI.
Two practical caveats worth knowing before you update:
- Siri AI ships in beta, in English first. Apple said French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish follow in October.
- Some features have usage limits, because they run on Apple's server-side models rather than on your phone. Apple said increased access comes with most iCloud+ plans.
Apple Intelligence more broadly will be available in 16 supported languages with this month's OS releases.
Image Playground, reimagined
Image Playground has been rebuilt to generate what Apple described as high-quality images in almost any style, rather than the narrow set of cartoon-ish looks it launched with.
This is the change most likely to matter to people who have never used an image generator before. Image Playground is not a separate app you have to find and sign up for — it is built into the phone, which means a very large number of people are about to write their first image prompt without ever deciding to try AI image generation.
If that is you, the thing worth knowing early is that style words carry more weight than subject words. "A dog" gives you an average dog. "A golden retriever photographed on 35mm film, soft afternoon light, shallow depth of field" gives you something specific. Our prompt library is built around exactly that difference if you want examples to work from.
Photos gets real editing tools
Apple Intelligence now powers a set of photo edits that go well past filters:
- Clean Up, upgraded with higher-quality infill for complex scenes — the tool that removes an object and reconstructs what was behind it.
- Extend, which expands an image outward to give the subject more room. This is outpainting, and it is genuinely useful when a shot is framed too tightly to crop.
- Spatial Reframing, the most interesting of the three, which changes the camera's apparent perspective after the photo was taken so you can adjust the composition.
Spatial Reframing is the one to watch. Reframing a finished photo is a generative operation — the pixels it needs did not exist when you pressed the shutter — so how convincingly it holds up on ordinary photos, rather than demo photos, is the open question.
Everyday system changes
The rest of the release is a long list of smaller improvements, most of which you will notice within a day of updating:
- Customisable Liquid Glass. The material introduced last year can now be tuned to taste.
- A smaller Dynamic Island. Redesigned to take less space while showing more — it now handles three live activities at once, so a flight, a timer and turn-by-turn directions can coexist.
- Faster AirDrop. Apple claims transfers up to 80% quicker.
- Better Search in Mail and other apps.
- Smarter network switching between cellular and Wi-Fi, so handovers are less likely to stall a download.
- Notify Me in Safari, which watches a web page and tells you when it changes. Useful for restocks, ticket releases and status pages.
- Shortcuts you can describe. You can now build an automation by writing what you want in plain language — for example, updating Calendar and Reminders whenever an email from school arrives — rather than assembling it block by block.
- A more helpful Phone app, which can surface information you are about to need when you call a business, such as pulling up a flight confirmation code.
- Better dictation. The new on-device model handles punctuation, spelling and capitalisation more accurately system-wide.
iPhone Handoff: one number, two iPhones
iOS 27 lets a single phone number work across two iPhones, with the number becoming active on whichever one you pick up. For anyone carrying a work phone and a personal phone, this removes the main reason to keep two numbers.
It launches with T-Mobile and Telekom Deutschland. Apple said Verizon and EE add support by the end of the year, with more carriers to follow. Carrier-gated features have a long history of arriving late, so treat that list as a starting point rather than a guarantee.
Child Safety controls
iOS 27 adds more flexible parental controls covering what children can see, who they are able to talk to, and when they have access to the device at all. Apple framed the third one — time-based access — as the piece parents had been asking for.
On iPhone Duo, iOS 27 becomes a different OS
The foldable required changes deep enough that they are worth listing separately: controls move to the side of the screen to preserve vertical space, the Dock turns vertical, Split View runs two apps side by side, apps can be paired so you return to both at once, and StandBy activates when you set the phone down even if it is not charging.
Those are covered in detail in our iPhone Duo write-up.
What this means if you write prompts
Three things in this release matter for prompt writing specifically.
Image Playground is now a mass-market image generator. The audience for well-written image prompts just got much larger, and most of that audience has never seen a prompt before.
Photographic Styles gained texture and grain control on iPhone 18 Pro, including a Film texture. Apple has effectively taught its whole user base the vocabulary that AI image prompts have always used: grain, texture, film. If you have been describing a look as "vintage" and getting a filter back, naming the grain and the texture instead is the fix. That change is covered in our iPhone 18 Pro post.
Apple started signing photos at the sensor. Apple Reference Image cryptographically signs image data at the moment of capture, and Apple is supporting the SynthID standard for identifying AI-generated and AI-edited images. The line between a photograph and a generated image is becoming something a phone can prove rather than something you argue about in a comment section — which is good news for everyone working honestly with either.
Release timing
Apple Intelligence features arrive with this month's OS releases in 16 languages. Siri AI is in beta in English now, with five more languages in October. The redesigned Health app was given a vaguer "later this year", starting in US English.
For the hardware these features were built around, see our iPhone 18 Pro breakdown and the full event recap.
