Every iOS update ships with a long list of features, and most people end up using only a few. iOS 27 came with a lot of small upgrades that are genuinely useful. Siri finally understands what’s on your screen without you explaining it, Photos get real editing tools instead of gimmicks, and Messages quietly fixes some of its most annoying bugs. So we went through the entire list and picked out the 20 features that are most likely to change how you actually use your iPhone day-to-day. Here are the iOS 27 features that are genuinely worth knowing about.
Finally, you can extend your photos and Lock Screen wallpaper. If you’ve ever tried setting a photo as your Lock Screen wallpaper only to have it crop someone’s head off or leave an awkward strip of empty space because the aspect ratios don’t match, this fixes it. The new Extend option analyses the existing image and generates additional matching background detail around the edges, so the photo fills the whole screen naturally instead of getting brutally cropped.
You can use it while setting a Lock Screen wallpaper or inside the Photos app itself. It won’t always be flawless on tricky backgrounds, but for the average holiday photo or portrait, it’s a very good feature, and I also used it to extended my Camp Nou picture through it.
Every iPhone photo now quietly captures spatial information at the moment you take it, and the new Reframe feature puts that to good use. It lets you adjust the angle a person or object appears at after the fact, using that spatial data to shift perspective and then having AI fill in whatever pixels are missing as a result.
So, if you handed your phone to a stranger and the resulting group photo has everyone tilted slightly wrong? You can fix it without just cropping the image. AI fills in the missing parts around the edges, so the edit looks more natural. It’s not going to turn a bad photo into a great one, but for the “almost right” shot ruined by one small angle issue.
The Clean Up tool has technically existed for a couple of years now, but it was mostly good for erasing a wrapper or a photobombing person in the background. However, complicated edits often looked fake.
Now in iOS 27, it can reconstruct much larger and busier backgrounds naturally. You get three modes depending on how much you’re asking for: Fast for simple, High Quality for busier or more complicated scenes and Auto, which chooses the best option for you. It’s the difference between a party trick and a tool you’d actually trust to fix a photo you care about.
If you select some text or long-press an image in any app, like Instagram, a PDF or a group chat, it doesn’t matter, and Siri can just tell you about it. It’ll summarise the text before you commit to reading it, translate a menu you’re squinting at in a restaurant, explain what a chart in a work presentation actually means, or ask where a photo was taken.
The genuinely impressive part is that this works in third-party apps too, which is the difference between a neat trick and something you’ll actually reach for daily. Before this, getting Siri’s help with something on your screen usually meant describing it out loud in detail and hoping it understood what you meant. Now you can just point at it and ask.
Siri’s writing tools now work in almost every text box in your iPhone, not just Apple’s own apps. You can ask it to draft something from scratch, shorten a message, turn bullet points into proper sentences, or make an email sound better before you hit send. In Mail and Messages specifically, it goes a step further and starts mimicking your own writing style, so Smart Replies actually sound like you instead of a customer service bot, with automatic proofreading running quietly in the background as you type.
Now, if you long-press an email, a new Ask Siri option shows up, and from there it can summarise the message, find your flight number, track a package without opening a separate app, or save an attached photo straight to your library. It can also do things for you, like delete every email from a specific sender at once, or move the important details into Reminders so you don’t forget them. And if you swipe down on any response, you can ask follow-up questions, and the whole conversation gets saved in the Siri app afterwards, so you’re not starting from scratch every time you open Mail again.
The Camera app now has a new Siri mode sitting alongside photo and video. It uses Visual Intelligence to identify pretty much whatever you point it at, like plants, animals, food, random objects you can’t name. Point it at your dinner, and it’ll tell you what it is and give you an estimate of the calories. You can also scan an event poster, and it’ll add the date straight to your calendar without you typing anything. It also handles on-the-spot text translation and can even help split a restaurant bill.
The Shortcut app has now become easy to use. Earlier, you had to build automations by dragging different blocks together, but now you can simply type what you want.
For example, you can say, “set tomorrow’s alarm based on my first calendar event, turn on Sleep Focus, and dim the bedroom lights every evening” and your iPhone will create a shortcut for you. These automations still trigger based on the time, location, app activity, or even when you take a screenshot.
Swipe down for Search or Ask. Spotlight as you knew it is gone. When you swipe down from the middle of your Home Screen, you get a single Search or Ask box, where you can either type a normal search or speak to Siri directly, and the iPhone will understand what you mean. Apple improved the entire search index at the same time, so results are noticeably more accurate.
Mail search gets a particularly nice upgrade here too. It now ranks by relevance and intent instead of just chronological date, and shows you up to five top results, making it much easier to find the email you need.
Use natural language for Reminders and Calendar entries. Type “pick up Dad at 6 PM tonight” or “send the photos to Manas tomorrow at 3 PM” into Reminders, and your iPhone will understand the date, time, and the location.
Calendar is also smarter now. As you type an event, it identifies people, dates, and locations in real time and lets you just tap the suggestion to add it. It’s a small change on paper, but it saves you from filling out every detail manually, making everyday planning much quicker.
If your Photos app is full of screenshots, memes, and forwarded WhatsApp images, you will appreciate this one. A new Captured by Me folder, inside Utilities, that gathers every photo actually shot with the Camera app on your current iPhone, including pictures from your older iPhones.
There’s also a separate Identity Documents folder that automatically collects photos of your passport, driving licence and other important documents into one place, instead of leaving them at random albums where you’ll never find them when you actually need them.
You can finally reply to a specific message from Android users in iOS 27. This one’s overdue enough that it’s almost funny it took this long. You can now long-press a specific message from a green-bubble Android contact and reply directly to it, the same way you’ve always been able to with blue-bubble iMessage conversations.
Previously, texting an Android user meant inline replies simply didn’t exist. If someone sent five messages in a row and you wanted to respond to the third one specifically, you just can’t. It’s a small change, but it makes chatting with Android users much less confusing.
When a message, photo or video fails to send, your iPhone now quietly retries it on its own instead of just leaving a red exclamation mark. Large attachments get smarter too- sending something big over a weak connection no longer holds up the rest of your conversation, since every item now gets its own individual progress bar instead of blocking everything behind it in a queue. There’s also a smaller but genuinely welcome fix for group chats: tapback notifications are now grouped, so if five people react to the same message, you won’t get five separate notifications.
If you’ve ever accidentally started recording a voice note, you can now change what that button does. In iOS 27, you can customise the button next to the message box in Messages.
Go to Settings, then Messages, then Show in Text Field, and you can now choose exactly what that button at the end of the message field does. You can set it to Record Audio if you actually want it there, Start Dictation if that’s more useful to you, or None if you’d rather it just didn’t exist at all. It’s a small setting, but it fixes one of those annoying little problems iPhone users have been dealing with for years.
If your Safari tab count has ever hit double digits because you don’t close the tabs, this is for you. Turn on Automatically Create Topics in Safari’s Tab View, under the three-line icon in the top-right corner and Safari will use AI to sort your open tabs into related groups based on what you’re actually doing.
So, if you’re planning a holiday while shopping for a new fridge, it’ll create separate collections for each instead of leaving everything mixed together.
Safari can now be told to keep an eye on a specific webpage and alert you the moment something on it changes. For example, if a product you’ve been watching that’s currently out of stock, a ticker isn’t available yet, or you’re waiting for a price drop. Notify Me, once turned on for a page, Safari keeps checking it in the background on your behalf so you don’t have to. This effectively kills off the need for the various third-party restock-tracking extensions and sites people have relied on for years.
The Passwords app can now help fix weak passwords for you. If you use Apple’s Passwords app, there’s a new feature that actively goes out and fixes your bad password habits for you.
Using Apple Intelligence, it can automatically navigate to eligible websites, sign in using your existing credentials, and update a weak or compromised password with a single tap. It’s a genuinely meaningful security upgrade dressed up as a minor convenience feature.
Find My gives you more control over location sharing in iOS 27. Earlier, you could only share your location for 1 hour, until the end of the day, or forever. Now, you can choose any duration you want, or you can set an exact date and time for it to stop automatically.
There’s also a quieter but arguably more useful addition: you can now pause sharing with a specific person until the end of the day without them being notified that you’ve done it. It gives you more control without having to change settings permanently.
Apple has reworked the Parental Controls in iOS 27, and the headline feature is Ask to Browse, which requires your explicit sign-off before your child can open any new website in Safari, sitting alongside the existing Ask to Buy for app downloads and a new permission requirement before they can contact someone they haven’t spoken to before.
Time Allowances now cap daily use of Entertainment, Games and Social Media apps with sensible age-based suggestions built in. Daily Schedules let you control which apps are even available at what times and Screen Time itself has been redesigned to show usage at a glance instead of requiring you to dig for it.
On top of that, Communication Safety also now blurs graphic images and violence, not just nudity, for anyone under 18, adding another layer of protection.
Apple gift cards can now be redeemed by simply holding the physical card against the back of your iPhone, using the same NFC hardware that already handles Apple Pay and AirDrop. You don’t have to open the camera to scan a barcode, no manually type out a 16-character code.
It will save your few seconds, but it makes the whole process much quicker and removes a small hassle from everyday use.