iOS 27 software review: Some additions, some tweaks, and some features worth a look

Apple's new iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone Duo grabbed most of the headlines during their past month's event, but it also marked the public availability of the final builds of the new iOS version: iOS 27.

The upgrade brings a few much-needed options, some new features, and some things under the hood. Let's try to go through some of the meaningful additions made:

Improved Photos app with editing features: Photos remains one of those apps Apple retouches regularly. The editing option to cut out unwanted objects from your photos, say, an object on the side or a person unintentionally added when you hit the shutter button, seems to have been improved now, and you can choose between faster editing or a higher-quality output (which seems more reliable). You can now also take a frame from your videos instead of waiting to take the screenshot at the right moment. Another thing is spatial reframing—the angle at which the photo is taken can be shifted now after capturing the shot. There's something called Extend that extrapolates your background to further extend it.

Siri/Apple Intelligence: Apple's take on AI is a lot more in-depth at the OS level now. Not only can you set something like a calendar entry or search something based on your messages instead of manually doing all the steps. Siri hasn't exactly been at the forefront of AI on smartphones, but it does appear to be on the right path with the recent update, albeit gradually getting there. It's not virtually shoved in your face like some of the other smartphone brands seem to be doing these days, so there's that, too.

New Ask to Buy for devices set for children: This new child safety feature gives parents or guardians better control over the content their child can or cannot access on the device. When it is enabled, the child has to get the parent's permission in order to get a new app. There's also Ask to Search, where web searches in Safari have to be approved manually.

Updated Shortcuts: The ability to have your custom shortcuts in iOS has been there for years—but these aren't always straightforward to make. With iOS 27, you can now just tell the Shortcuts app what you want to get done. This way, you can get exactly your task done as and when needed and don't have to rely on somebody else having made a shortcut for exactly what you needed.

Other useful features added: In Safari, you can enable Notify Me to get alerts when some content on a particular webpage changes—could be some price, event schedule update, or so on. You can tell what exactly you're looking for from a webpage and get alerts for it.

The new iOS 27 also brings bigger widgets in order to view more information at once.

The OS now also allows you to decide the liquid glass effect—whether you want a more tinted or a clearer look for the user interface. I set it somewhere near the middle for now. The option probably should have been added by now, but it is nice to see it's there now.

In brief, iOS 27 brings some nice new additions alongside some much-needed options to the iPhone. There are certainly some more things you might wish the company adds to it (such as for the keyboard), but for now, it's generally looking good. The iOS 27 upgrade is available for all iPhones—from the latest generation back to the iPhone 11.