Apple just dropped the news on the next major iPhone software upgrade, iOS 27, at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC 2026), and it looks like a good one.
Instead of just piling on flashy new tricks, the big focus this year is simply making everything run a whole lot better.
Expect smoother animations, snappier responsiveness, and a serious speed boost across the entire system. Apple is promising that iPhone and iPad apps will launch up to 30% faster, while photos will pop up in your library up to 70% quicker than before. Sharing things gets a massive leg up too, thanks to up to 80% improvement in AirDrop speeds and a fivefold increase in file transfer rates to external storage.
One of the standout tweaks comes to the Liquid Glass design. Apple has refined the effect to make text and icons much easier to read. Even better, they have introduced a new system-wide slider that lets you personalise the transparency effects to your exact taste.
Previously, your only choice was a blunt accessibility switch to turn transparency off completely, but this new sliding scale gives you proper control over how Liquid Glass looks across iOS and the rest of the ecosystem. The design is also getting a fresh layered effect, giving app icons a striking, almost-three-dimensional depth.
The best part of the announcement is that Apple confirmed every single device currently running iOS 26 will be able to handle iOS 27 too. This means if you are still using an iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, or iPhone 11 Pro Max, you will get to enjoy all these performance gains and visual upgrades without having to shell out for a brand new phone.
You can download the public beta version of iOS 27 right now. As for the stable version, you probably have until the release of the iPhone 18 Series this September.