Apple’s iOS 27 developers have reportedly been tasked with bringing to iPhone a feature many users have asked for, and every one actually wants. And it’s not AI. No, it seems the focus of the next major upgrade will be on removing bugs and improving the performance of the operating system.
The same supposedly goes for the next major version of macOS, iPadOS and other Apple OSs.
iOS 27 should kill bugs for every iPhone user
Some iPhone users claim recent iOS releases are riddled with bugs that degrade their experience: complaints range from severe battery drain and device overheating to laggy keyboard behavior and UI freezes. Extreme problems rarely plague users of more recent iPhone models, but appear to be more common for those with older devices.
At the heart of the problem is the staggering number of iPhones in daily use around the world: roughly 1.5 billion. So an iOS bug that affects 0.1% of iPhone users nevertheless irritates 1.5 million people, and many of them express their dissatisfaction loudly.
But with iOS 27, Apple is going on a bug hunt.
“For iOS 27 and next year’s other major operating system updates — including macOS 27 — the company is focused on improving the software’s quality and underlying performance,” Bloomberg‘s Marc Gurman reported in the Power On email newsletter on Sunday.
iPad users should be pleased that the same is true for iPadOS 27. And the upcoming watchOS version, and so on.
“Aiming to improve the software, engineering teams are now combing through Apple’s operating systems, hunting for bloat to cut, bugs to eliminate, and any opportunity to meaningfully boost performance and overall quality,” Bloomberg‘s report also indicates.
Apple shifts strategy: Stability over new features
Astute readers might point out that Apple uses every operating update to stamp out bugs. The difference with the iOS 27, macOS 27, etc. is that fixing the code will allegedly take priority over introducing new features.
Removing bugs from operating systems is a far more complex problem than many might realize. Large systems like iOS and macOS contain millions of lines of code, some over a decade old. That old code often interacts with newer layers in ways that aren’t fully documented. Fixing one bug can introduce others, so there’s a tendency to avoid dealing with small problems. But with Apple putting an emphasis on cleaning up the code, developers should have time to eradicate problems.
That’s not to say Apple users can’t look forward to any new features in 2026. The company will still be rolling out new AI-powered capabilities, with the debut of the AI-enhanced version of Siri scheduled to come to a fresh iOS 26 version in the spring.
iOS 27 is expected to launch in fall 2026, with macOS 27, iPadOS 27 and other OS upgrades coming out of Cupertino at the same time.
Ed Hardy has been writing full-time about tech for 25 years, and using it for much longer than that. His intro to Apple was a Macintosh Classic II (which he still has), but now he uses a 13-inch iPad Pro as his primary computer. He’s written for NotebookReview, TabletPCReview, and Brighthand, as well as other sites.
