iOS 27 is out now, here are the features actually worth trying first

[Beth]

iOS 27 rolled out this week to every iPhone 11 and newer, and while Siri AI and the broader Liquid Glass redesign have understandably grabbed most of the headlines, there is a genuinely solid batch of smaller features worth trying immediately once you actually update. Performance is the first thing you will notice, with Apple speeding up a long list of everyday interactions, animations run quicker, apps launch faster, AirDrop transfers complete faster, and even opening the keyboard or switching Home Screen pages feels noticeably snappier than it did on iOS 26.

The Photos app picked up two genuinely useful new generative AI tools worth trying, Reframe and Extend. Reframe lets you shift the apparent camera angle of an existing photo after the fact, as if you had physically moved before actually taking the shot, while Extend analyzes the surrounding texture, lighting, and color of a too tightly cropped image and generates believable new background detail around its edges. The existing Clean Up tool for removing unwanted objects from photos also got a real quality boost, doing a noticeably better job of cleanly filling in whatever gets removed rather than leaving an obvious smudged patch behind.

Writing Tools now work system wide too, with a new Write with Siri option accessible directly from the keyboard that can draft text from scratch, give feedback on something you already wrote, adjust tone or wording, or even analyze your own past emails and messages to write convincingly in your specific personal style. Your iPhone also now automatically suggests grammar fixes on top of the existing spelling correction. Elsewhere, the redesigned Weather app adds a new panel showing detailed six hour conditions with tappable icons for clouds, rain, or wind, each offering its own extended ten day prediction, and a new Tap to Share feature brings genuinely closer parity between in person Apple Pay at a physical register and the Apple Pay experience you already know from using it inside Safari.

For anyone who finds Liquid Glass's transparency effects genuinely distracting rather than stylish, there is finally a proper slider in Settings under Appearance letting you drag between More Clear and More Tinted, with a live scrollable preview showing exactly how the effect will look over real text and images before you commit to a setting, on top of the existing more binary Reduce Transparency accessibility toggle for anyone who wants to flatten the effect completely

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