In the 11 years I’ve been writing annual iOS and iPadOS reviews every summer, I don’t think I’ve ever struggled to find an “angle” for my story as much as I did this year. The reason was twofold: I wasn’t particularly enamored with Siri AI and Apple’s belated chatbot efforts; and, as I realized during the summer, it can be challenging to write about an OS update that is largely focused on performance improvements and refinements.
“Everyone wants a so-called Snow Leopard year until it actually happens,” I thought to myself on several occasions over the past few months. Think about it: on paper, we all love a good ol’ basket of bug fixes that just make our phones better without changing much about the overall design and experience of iOS. It’s a commendable effort, and there’s no denying that iOS 27 is the snappiest (insert meme here), most stable version of iOS I’ve ever tested – and it has been since the first developer beta. In practice, though, it turns out that considering a major iOS update merely through the lens of improvements and fixes can be…a little boring.
So I’ve been sitting on this review for a while. I let it simmer. Then, a month ago, as I was sunbathing with my girlfriend Silvia down south in beautiful Vieste, Puglia, it hit me: iOS 27 is a geographically ambiguous update. Stay with me here. Depending on where you are in the world, this update can either be a little boring or pretty exciting.
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If you’re a MacStories reader with access to Siri AI, you fall on the “pretty exciting” end of the spectrum. From my perspective as someone who’s been using frontier models and has embraced different agentic workflows over the past year, Siri AI can’t compete with the intelligence offered by models from the four American companies leading the AI race right now. As I wrote back in July, however, Siri AI has an advantage: its proprietary integration with iOS frameworks, personal context, and third-party apps.
As I’ll explore in the Siri AI chapter, the results can be hit or miss: inferior intelligence and lack of agentic features won’t impress power users who have grown accustomed to the likes of Claude Cowork and ChatGPT Work. At the same time, what Siri AI can accomplish with Apple’s own apps and compatible third-party ones is an objectively nicer and more powerful iOS-native experience than anything else on the market right now. And: even if Siri AI’s chatbot capabilities don’t land at the frontier of AI benchmarks, it undeniably is a better Siri for Siri-type tasks than it’s ever been. I know: that’s not a high bar to clear, but the difference is quite dramatic if you go back to the old Siri.
In the three months that I’ve spent with iOS 27, I’ve come to appreciate the “little boring” side as much as the exciting one, which is not what I was expecting after WWDC. Even if we set aside the dozens of features introduced by Siri AI and Apple Intelligence, iOS 27 is the kind of update that fixes hundreds (not hyperbole) of paper cuts throughout the entire operating system.
You may not notice them at first: perhaps you’ll think that Notes always allowed you to insert a divider line, or that Music’s Now Playing screen always worked in landscape mode, or that you’ve been able to export a frame from a video in Photos for a while now. And that’s where iOS 27’s “boring” nature turns into its opposite: if you’re the kind of iPhone and iPad user who cares about this stuff, these smaller enhancements across Apple’s entire catalog of apps will probably mean more to you than a barebones Siri chatbot app. My goal with this review is to shine a spotlight on these smaller improvements that have had a meaningful impact on my everyday iPhone experience.
I may have struggled to fully understand iOS 27 for a while, and perhaps to an extent I still do, as we’ll see with Siri AI. But I know one thing now: iOS 27 is not a Snow Leopard release. It’s less flashy than last year’s Liquid Glass update, and it’s not as bombastic for iPad users as iPadOS 26 was. Instead, iOS 27 shows that Apple is still capable of delivering something new while caring about the old.
Let’s dive in.
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DesignIf you’ve been following Apple for some time, you know that there’s almost a natural – some would say “institutional” – process to how the company’s design team takes bold leaps forward, then refines and iterates on them over time. It happened with Aqua. It happened – loudly, in the age of social media and the then-nascent YouTuber space – with iOS 7. This year, it’s happening with Liquid Glass. As John Gruber once quipped: this is how Apple rolls.
It’s no secret that I ended up enjoying Liquid Glass and what Apple set out to achieve with its focus on fluid, compact interfaces. That appreciation has only grown over the past year: I found myself gravitating toward third-party apps that embraced Liquid Glass instead of the ones that stubbornly refused to acknowledge its existence, which is usually a pretty good sign that something is clicking with me. As I wrote last year, however, Liquid Glass was not perfect: it carried intrinsic readability and accessibility shortcomings that would often make some UI elements hard to visually parse or small text illegible against clear backgrounds.
On balance, Apple stuck the landing with Liquid Glass in iOS 26. Anecdotally speaking, in conversations I’ve had with real-life friends (who are most definitely not MacStories readers) over the past year, I’d say that Liquid Glass was a success with people. The fact that a bunch of Android manufacturers have ended up copying Liquid Glass is a sign that, despite what some fringes of the old Apple commentariat would have you believe, the market has not rejected Liquid Glass. At the end of the day, the numbers speak for themselves.
One of the reasons I like covering Apple products is what I mentioned at the outset: success notwithstanding, the company does not stand still. As I suspected last year, Apple designers have not gone back to the drawing board and “scrapped” Liquid Glass (I remember reading some folks suggest that); Liquid Glass is still here, as is the focus on minimizing UI chrome and emphasizing the content space. The company has, however, done something unusual with iOS 27: it has doubled down on both ends of the Liquid Glass spectrum by embracing, once again, customization.
Instead of attempting to find a “balanced” take on Liquid Glass that would please everybody, Apple now allows users who really love Liquid Glass to make it even clearer and “glass-ier” than before; at the same time, it’s letting folks who strongly dislike it make Liquid Glass more opaque and frostier than ever.
In addition to new personalization options, Apple has improved the underlying Liquid Glass rendering engine to diffuse content more effectively, reworked the specular highlights system to create a better “layered” effect than iOS 26, and more. Will this be enough to guarantee a smoother adoption by app developers who have resisted Liquid Glass? Are these changes a cop-out, or a reasonable move to make the iPhone more customizable for folks with different priorities and needs?
Let’s take a look.
Customizable Glass
The first major change for Liquid Glass in iOS 27 is a new ‘Appearance’ section of Settings that consolidates some options (which were previously available under ‘Display & Brightness’) and introduces new personalization settings for the Liquid Glass material.
In iOS 26, Liquid Glass could only be either ‘Clear’ or ‘Tinted’. In iOS 27, there is now a slider in Settings → Appearance → Liquid Glass that lets you choose any level between three default styles: More Clear, Default, and More Tinted. Unlike last year’s basic preview, the new screen in iOS 27 lets you preview what real UI elements would look like with different glass levels on top of photos of Apple Park’s ring building, the Rainbow, and a certain mythical creature.
The new customization menu for Liquid Glass.
At its clearest setting, Liquid Glass is as clear as it’s ever been. If you’re a Liquid Glass sicko like me and did not mind the ultra-glassy look of iOS 26 beta 1 last year, dragging the slider all the way to the left in iOS 27 is what you want to do. As long as you can live with severe legibility issues in apps that scroll content under tab bars or floating toolbars, you’re going to have the time of your life with a hyper-polished glass material that fluidly morphs and animates on screen even better than last year thanks to iOS 27’s (many) performance and rendering improvements. I’ll be blunt: this is the setting I use, and I love it. YOLO.
The same app with clearest Liquid Glass (left), default (center), and tinted.
iOS 26’s clear Liquid Glass vs. iOS 27’s clearest setting.
Tinted Liquid Glass across iOS 26 and 27. Notice the more “layered” appearance of iOS 27’s material.
On a more serious note, it is interesting to observe where the defaults have landed for Apple’s design team in the past year. On average, the new ‘Default’ option in iOS 27 is more tinted than the ‘Clear’ setting of iOS 26. This suggests to me that Apple collected feedback and understood that more people would benefit from having a slightly more tinted Liquid Glass appearance by default than the other way around. At the same time, Apple is introducing personalization as a way to appease those who loved Liquid Glass as well as those who couldn’t stand it.
I encourage everyone upgrading to iOS 27 today to play around with the new Liquid Glass appearance settings and see which one you prefer – and, remember, you can set the slider at any point between the three default styles offered by Apple. Below, I am including some comparison shots that demonstrate different Liquid Glass levels in Apple’s own apps as well as Waluigi’s Glass Lab, a demo app I created with Codex for this review to show off new Apple APIs and Liquid Glass UI elements. (No, I am not accepting testers for Waluigi’s Glass Lab, I’m sorry.)
A context menu in Files with clear (left) and tinted Liquid Glass.
Notice how the Notes toolbars change between clear and tinted Liquid Glass in iOS 27.
The Safari address bar with clear (left), default, and tinted Liquid Glass.
All third-party apps built for iOS 26 receive the new Liquid Glass material “for free” in iOS 27. Pictured: Overcast with clear setting (left) and tinted.
Waluigi’s Glass Lab with clear, default, and tinted Liquid Glass.
Clear and tinted Liquid Glass in this very important app.
After three months with iOS 27, my takeaway is that there’s more to this year’s Liquid Glass than different transparency levels alone. What I find more impressive, in fact, is the work that has gone into improving the underlying rendering engine and how it diffuses content and layers UI elements in the first place. It is maybe a little cliché to say, but this is what Liquid Glass should have been all along. Thanks to a combination of more effective diffusion and refraction, darkened edges, and brighter specular highlights, the updated Liquid Glass is more legible and does a better job of creating multiple “layers” of glass that stand out against content.
Take the Music app’s ‘Get Up!’ playlist and its warm orange background, for example, and its pink-accented tab bar. The selected ‘Home’ tab in iOS 27 is drastically more readable than last year’s – and I am using the clearest version of Liquid Glass.
Another iOS 26 reversal: the search button is back inside the tab bar instead of floating next to it. The other “button style” is still supported, but Apple itself is using the unified style again in its apps.
The context menu? The darker edge around it makes it feel more layered than before – almost as if it’s “floating” on screen. This has also allowed Apple designers to use a glassy material for it, which is stunning compared to last year’s dark context menu:
I mean, there’s no contest here, right?
As you use iOS 27, you’ll notice this better separation of layers and improved diffusion everywhere, so I’ll spare you the dozens of examples here. You get the gist.
All this begs the question: is customization a way to fix Liquid Glass’ underlying problems by sweeping them under the rug of “fine, you fix it for yourself”? Yes and no.
To an extent, a slider lets Apple have their cake and eat it too: Liquid Glass die-hards are happy, the material is a bit more tinted by default, and those who absolutely despise it can adjust the slider all the way to the right. But I’m not a pessimistic tech commentator, and I’ve followed this company long enough to reiterate that I believe the static, “bestowed upon users with no tweaking allowed” era of software design is over, and has been for a while. I don’t know if making Liquid Glass more customizable had always been in the cards; what I do know is that Apple has been embracing deeper user customization for several years now. A more customizable Liquid Glass is consistent with the work Apple has been doing in opinionated, yet flexible UI design for the last six versions of iOS.
If you ask me, it would have been a mistake for Apple not to make Liquid Glass more customizable this year. In fact, I’d go one step further and wish I could customize Liquid Glass per app, just like I can tweak text sizes for individual apps across the system. I’d love to make Music clear and Safari a bit more tinted, for example.
The new Liquid Glass looks great, and there continues to be nothing else that matches its aesthetic, performance, and shape-shifting nature across the entire tech landscape.
Extra Large Widgets on iPhone
It is quite funny that one of my favorite “small” additions to iOS 27 for iPhone users is called “extra large” widgets. As the name implies, this new size class lets you add widgets that take up an entire Home Screen page, allowing apps to use an expansive canvas for custom content and interactions that would otherwise have felt cramped on smaller widgets.
In Apple’s apps, you can now find extra large Home Screen widgets for:
- Calendar
- Home
- Music
- Notes
- Photos
- Reminders
- Shortcuts
- Stocks
- Weather
I know what you’re thinking: these widgets were designed for the inner display of the iPhone Duo, and you wouldn’t be wrong. As early marketing materials and hands-on impressions have shown, it should be very nice to keep a stack of XL widgets on one side of the inner Home Screen and regular icons on the other.
In my testing with the iPhone 17 Pro this summer, I’ve enjoyed this new widget family as a way to preview content that apps usually present as long lists. When I have a busy day with many events and tasks, it’s great to flick through the Calendar and Reminders widgets and get a complete overview of what’s coming up without opening those apps.
The new extra large widgets are also great as Home Screen-native control dashboards. Since the new size allows for multiple interaction areas in the widget panel, you can effectively have dozens of launchers or actions baked into the same widget. The Shortcuts XL widget, for instance, lets you run up to 16 shortcuts without launching the app; the Home widget lets you control up to 14 accessories or scenes from the Home Screen.
It’s no surprise, then, to see third-party developers jump at this opportunity to showcase even more content and actions from their apps on the Home Screen. The excellent dictionary app LookUp now comes with an extra large ‘Word of the Day’ widget that not only displays beautiful artwork for any given curated word but also embeds buttons to mark a definition as favorite, shuffle through words, and even listen to a word’s pronunciation from the Home Screen. The folks at Mercury Weather have shipped a stunning XL widget that’s not only tinted based on current weather conditions but also shows hourly and weekly forecasts in the same widget thanks to the increased content area. And, of course, apps like Launcher and Lock Launcher are taking advantage of the larger surface to embed even more app shortcuts on the Home Screen, effectively serving as quasi-replacements for the default Home Screen app launching experience.
From left to right: LookUp, Mercury Weather, and Lock Launcher.
Extra large widgets are yet another step toward letting users have complete “mini app” experiences directly from the Home Screen – a trend that started years ago with the introduction of Home Screen widgets in iOS 14. I’m a fan of this new size, and I look forward to testing it on the iPhone Duo.
Lock Screen Changes
There are two changes worth noting to the Lock Screen this year. The first one is the complete opposite of extra large widgets: a minimized clock option that puts the current time next to the date at the top of the Lock Screen, right underneath the Dynamic Island.
The new small clock on the Lock Screen.
To enable this mode, you can customize the Lock Screen, tap the clock to enter the ‘Font & Color’ panel, then tap the new symbol in the top-right corner of the panel to toggle between large and small clocks:
While I appreciate the addition of this option for minimalistic Lock Screen setups, it defeats the purpose of an always-on display for me. From my perspective, the point of having a modern iPhone with an always-on Lock Screen is to glance at the display from a distance and tell the time quickly if I’m not wearing my Apple Watch; the minimized clock prevents me from doing that. But I also know that this design makes more sense on the iPhone Duo and its smaller screen.
The other change is that you can now swipe away the system’s Now Playing control on the Lock Screen when something is playing. In iOS 27, swiping on the control will reveal a ‘Clear’ button that lets you remove the Live Activity from the Lock Screen:
Notably, clearing away the Now Playing control also removes the activity from the Dynamic Island, but it does not interrupt or pause audio playback. It’s just a nice way to clear out the Lock Screen.
Icon Updates
One last favorite change of mine deserves a proper visual look instead of too many words about it: all the Liquid Glass Home Screen icons have been refreshed with a more detailed, sharper look.
According to Apple, the new app icons in iOS 27 have “more character, detail, and sharpness in light, dark, tinted, or all-clear looks,” and this has been made possible by the use of additional Liquid Glass layers in each icon as well as the aforementioned improvements to rendering and diffusion.
I’ll explain it another way: comparing the old iOS 26 icons against the new ones in iOS 27 feels like putting prescription glasses on and seeing everything clearly for the first time. There is an underlying blurriness and softness to iOS 26’s original icons that I didn’t notice until I actually started comparing them side by side with iOS 27.
I love this change, and to properly show off the differences in this review, I decided to try something different. Below, you’ll find a gallery of all system icons from iOS 26 and iOS 27, which you can compare across the four system tints: light, dark, clear light, and clear dark.
I’ll let Apple