Look, every year Apple walks on stage, spends an hour hyping up the one or two big things (this year it was the new Siri, obviously), and then quietly ships a pile of smaller stuff that never gets a single second of screen time. And honestly? That smaller stuff is usually what actually changes how you use your phone day to day.
So I went digging through the first iOS 27 developer beta. Here are the changes worth knowing about that Apple didn’t bother mentioning.
Full-Screen Widgets Finally Happened
You can now slap a full-screen widget on your Home screen. One widget, the whole page. If you live in your calendar or you want news front and center the second you unlock, this is great. Android’s had it forever, so it’s nice to see iOS catch up.
Separate Volume For Alarms, Timers, and Alerts
This is the one I’m weirdly excited about. For years your alarm volume and your ringtone volume were chained together, which is how you end up getting blasted awake or sleeping through everything. Now you can set them independently. Head to Settings, Sounds & Haptics, flip off “Match Ringtone Volume,” and tune the sliders yourself.
The Keyboard Now Offers To Paste For You
When you’ve got text or a screenshot sitting on your clipboard, iOS 27 surfaces a paste option right above the keyboard. Same idea as those one-time passcodes that auto-suggest from Messages. Small thing, saves you the long-press-and-tap dance every single time.
Weather App Got a Glow-up
The Weather app has a new highlights section that flags notable stuff coming up in the next few days, and you can now quickly flip between Conditions, Precipitation, and Wind views without digging around. Cleaner, faster, more useful at a glance.
Messages Can Draw Now
There’s a new Drawing option in Messages, so you can sketch a quick note or doodle and fire it off. You can also customize the text field to show a voice recording button, a dictation button, or just hide them if you never use them. Nice bit of “make it work the way you want” energy.
Camera Controls Got Pulled Out of The Basement
Depth, grid, and level controls used to be buried where you had to actually know they existed. iOS 27 surfaces them properly. If you take a lot of photos, this is a genuine upgrade. If you’re a point-and-shoot person, you won’t even notice, which is kind of the point.
Find My Can Hide You, Quietly
You can now hide your location from one specific person for a set amount of time, and they don’t get any notification about it. From a privacy standpoint this is actually one of the smarter changes in the whole release. No awkward “why can’t I see your location” conversation required.
Pull Stills Straight from a Video
In Photos, you can now save a single frame from a video as a still image. If you’ve ever tried to screenshot the perfect moment from a clip, you know why this matters.
Shared Albums Grew Up
Shared Albums get full-resolution sharing, reactions, filtering, more invite options, and (finally) the ability to set them to expire. That last one is great for the classic “trip’s over, where did everyone put the photos” situation.
Accessibility Quietly Crushed It
Some of the strongest small additions are in Accessibility. VoiceOver gives richer image descriptions now, and there’s a new captioning feature that generates synced subtitles for videos. It can even translate existing captions, which makes saved and shared clips way easier to follow without a separate app.
A Pile of Little Wins
A bunch of tiny stuff that adds up:
- Wallet lets you create your own custom passes now.
- CarPlay finally has an audio scrubbing option.
- You can manually sync files, photos, and Health data to iCloud instead of waiting on the system.
- Calendar can detect holidays and ask whether you actually want to keep your scheduled alarms.
- The emoji keyboard has a little scroll bar at the bottom.
- The Timer gets a new slider UI when you pull it up from Control Center.
- Dynamic Island can set timers directly and hand things off to Siri.
The Takeaway
None of this is going to headline a keynote, and that’s fine. The Siri overhaul is the showpiece, sure. But the separate alarm volume, the smarter clipboard, the camera controls actually being reachable? That’s the stuff you’ll feel every day. This is one of those updates where the release notes are way more interesting than the stage.
iOS 27 is in developer beta now, with a public beta expected in July and the full release landing this fall, though it is worth checking your iPhone is on the supported list first. As always, beta means beta, so don’t put it on the phone you actually need.
