In June, Apple previewed its next major iOS update, iOS 27, which will become widely available for supported iPhones in September. As with all major iOS updates, installing the new operating system feels like getting an entirely new smartphone without having to buy one. With iOS 27, your existing iPhone will have more features, refinements, and tools.
And, good news, you don’t need to wait until September to get iOS 27 on your iPhone. Anyone can download the iOS 27 public beta, which Apple released this week. If you want to put iOS 27 on your iPhone today, here are some of the best new features to try.
A Siri AI app, finally
Apple’s personal assistant, Siri, has long had a couple of major problems: It has performed pretty poorly with even basic requests, and there has been no dedicated Siri app in which to interact with the assistant.
iOS 27 changes all that with a revamped Siri AI and app. It’s far and away the most significant new feature of iOS 27. Now, Siri is powered by Apple Foundation Models based on Google’s Gemini models, which means that it can answer your request much more capably and accurately than before.
Siri AI is now also available in a new dedicated app. If you’re familiar with other AI chatbot apps, like ChatGPT or Google Gemini, you’ll know instantly how to use the new Siri app, and you’ll be able to return to it and view or continue your previous conversations with Siri for the first time ever.
Better photo editing
We’ve all wanted to remove stray objects that clutter our otherwise perfect photos, and with the advent of AI photo editing tools, this has become a snap—in apps other than the iPhone’s dedicated Photos app. Before iOS 27, it would have been charitable to say that the Photos app’s Clean Up tool was subpar compared to options in other image-editing apps.
But in iOS 27, the Clean Up tool has been dramatically improved, allowing for tidier object removals that leave your images looking as if they were composed nearly perfectly when you snapped them.
Nutritional insights
Another cool AI improvement in iOS 27 is an upgrade to the software’s Vision Intelligence tool, which allows AI to analyze what it sees in your photographs or through your camera lens.
Now, your iPhone can look at a plate of food and analyze nutritional insights about it. While the feature cannot tell you how many calories are in that bowl of spaghetti and meatballs you’re chowing down on, it can tell you whether its nutritional value is high or low, reveal more information about the dish’s ingredients, and let you know whether it is highly processed.
Notifications about web updates
In iOS 27, the Safari web browser is getting many enhancements, but one of the coolest is a relatively small feature that will notify you when a specific web page is updated.
You can tell Safari to notify you when there is a change to the website. This could mean your favorite blog adding a new post, or an e-commerce site’s page revealing a price change for a product you were eyeing.
A more bearable Liquid Glass
While the above features are excellent examples of how iOS 27 is being built around AI capabilities, there is one non-AI feature that many iPhone users will probably adore in iOS 27: the ability to further customize the look of Liquid Glass.
Now, the iPhone will include a slider that lets users control the transparency of Liquid Glass better than ever. Move the slider to the left to make Liquid Glass elements more transparent or to the right to make them less transparent and more frosted—or anywhere in between.
How to get the iOS 27 public beta—and a word of warning
To get the iOS 27 public beta, you’ll need to sign up for the Apple Beta Software Program, which grants you access. You can’t just run Software Update on your iPhone.
Once you’ve signed up, you can download the beta to your iPhone by going to the Settings app, tapping General, tapping Software Update, tapping Beta Updates, and then selecting the iOS 27 Public Beta option.
But a big word of warning: Betas can be buggy, and those bugs can sometimes lead to data loss. That’s why, before you install any iOS 27 beta, you should make sure you have backups of all your data on your iPhone, should the worst happen.
If the prospect of data loss makes you squeamish, wait to install the final version of iOS 27 when Apple releases it in September.
