Are you still waiting for more patches to materialize and fix something that’s bugging you about iOS 26?
First time I hate the new iOS 26 so much. Everything is wobbly, flashy, distracting. Most of things are unreadable.
Who on Earth decided that switching tabs should be so flashy?? (It is even worse on the device in 120 FPS) pic.twitter.com/7bIgkoxdd9
— Slava Cherk (@SlavaCherk) September 15, 2025
I have good news: A really big patch for iOS 26 is reportedly coming, and it’s iOS 27.
iOS 26 was actually pretty well received, and I wouldn’t want to make it sound like Apple is scrambling to fix it, but it was a big, ambitious update. Bloomberg’s Apple scoop-getter, Mark Gurman, claims the next mobile operating system will be, quite reasonably, less ambitious. Gurman says it will be to iOS 26 what 2009’s Snow Leopard MacOS update was to 2007’s Leopard—less a reinvention than an attempt to perfect what its predecessor was trying to do.
First of all, once again to all the Liquid Glass haters: Apple has indicated that there will be no takebacks here. You’re stuck with this vibe across all your Apple devices for the next few years. There have already been some tweaks, and Gurman hints that iOS 27 will “include adjustments to the new styling.”
Intuitively, the most obvious area of focus when trying to mop up problems with this hardware-intensive update would be the slight but pervasive jank distributed across the whole OS—interconnected issues of sluggishness, weirdness, battery drain, and overheating.
Indeed, the unfailingly polite Gurman says that while he personally never experienced any of these downsides, Apple engineers are “combing through Apple’s operating systems, hunting for bloat to cut, bugs to eliminate, and any opportunity to meaningfully boost performance and overall quality.”
He also notes that “user interface glitches,” “keyboard failures,” and “cellular connectivity snags” have been reported by users.
But it won’t all be minor tweaks, and there will reportedly be a few major updates that “center 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 in search of a problem, this is an area where a small fix might make a huge difference. The feature rolled out in a disastrous, hallucination-laden form, breaking non-existent news stories that undermined trust in at least one news outlet that did nothing wrong. The feature was pulled, and then returned in a less exciting form. By being stingy with specificity in iOS 26, notification summaries avoid catastrophe, but also usefulness. With iOS 27, Apple has a chance to finally nail it on the third try.
iOS 26.4 is when users will reportedly get the long-awaited, secretly Google-powered, Siri update—the one that might finally make Apple’s voice assistant do something interesting for the first time in over a decade. But that big AI feature added to the current OS could be followed by related iOS 27 features like a paid “health focused AI agent,” AI-powered web search features, and apparently an Apple chatbot app that Gurman says is currently known as “Veritas,” and used as a “proving ground for the re-architected Siri.”
All this Siri talk feels like a time shift back to the 20-teens, so forgive me if I sum up what the update from iOS 26 to iOS 27 will probably mean with a paraphrase from that era: If you like your iOS, you can keep it.
