For the first time I hated the new iOS 26 so much. Everything is wobbly, flashy, distracting. Most things are unreadable.
Who on earth decided that switching tabs had to be so attractive?? (It’s even worse on devices in 120 fps) pic.twitter.com/7bIgkoxdd9
– Slaw Cherk (@SlawCherk) 15 September 2025
I have good news: There’s reportedly a big patch coming for iOS 26, and it’s iOS 27.
iOS 26 was really well received, and I wouldn’t want to sound like Apple is struggling to get it right, but it was a big, ambitious update. Bloomberg’s Apple scoop-getter, Mark Gurman, claims that the next mobile operating system will be, to a large extent, less ambitious. Gurman says it will be to iOS 26 what 2009’s Snow Leopard was to the MacOS update 2007’s Leopard — less a reinvention than an attempt to perfect what its predecessor was trying to do.
First of all, once again for all the liquid glass haters: Apple has indicated that there will be no returns here. You’ll be stuck with this vibe on all your Apple devices for the next few years. There have already been some changes, and Gurman hints that iOS 27 will “include adjustments to the new styling.”
Intuitively, the most obvious area of focus when attempting to iron out the problems with this hardware-intensive update will be the minor but widespread junk distributed throughout the OS – the interconnected issues of slowness, weirdness, battery drain, and overheating.
In fact, the extremely polite Gurman says that when he personally Never experiencing any of these negative aspects, Apple engineers “are scouring Apple’s operating systems, looking for any opportunity to cut bloat, eliminate bugs, and meaningfully boost performance and overall quality.”
They also noted that “user interface glitches,” “keyboard failures,” and “cellular connectivity interruptions” have been reported by users.
But these won’t be all minor changes, and there will reportedly be some major updates that “focus on AI, an area where the company is still playing catch-up.”
Given that AI notification summaries in particular still seem to be a solution looking for a problem, this is one area where a small fix could make a huge difference. The feature began as a destructive, hallucination-filled, breaking non-existent news story that undermined trust in at least one news outlet that did nothing wrong. The feature was removed, and then returned in a less exciting form. By being stingy with specificity in iOS 26, notification summaries not only avoid mayhem, but also keep usefulness. With iOS 27, Apple finally has a chance to achieve this on the third try.
iOS 26.4 is when users will reportedly get the long-awaited, secretly Google-powered, Siri update — which could finally give Apple’s voice assistant something interesting for the first time in more than a decade. But that big AI feature added to the existing OS will be followed by related iOS 27 features such as paid “health-focused AI agents”, AI-powered web search features, and apparently an Apple chatbot app, which Gurman says is currently known as “Veritas”, and can be used as a “proving base for a re-architected Siri.”
All this Siri talk sounds like a throwback to 20-something times, so forgive me if I summarize what the update from iOS 26 to iOS 27 will mean with a brief recap of that era: If you like your iOS you can keep it.
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