The iOS 27 new features that arrived alongside Apple‘s WWDC25 announcements run considerably deeper than Siri’s AI glow-up. Yes, Apple Intelligence grabbed the keynote spotlight when the conference ran from 9 to 13 June 2025, according to the Apple Newsroom. But buried beneath the AI headlines is a solid haul of practical upgrades to Maps, Wallet, Music, Notes, and more.
What Apple Maps and Find My Actually Gained
Apple Maps is getting two additions that look suspiciously like a response to Google Maps and social discovery apps. The first is a refresh of Flyover, the immersive 3D city-view feature, with more detailed visuals and smoother navigation. The second is Local Lists, a new way to surface trending restaurant and attraction recommendations inside Maps itself.
The Local Lists pitch is straightforward: stop switching to Instagram or TikTok to figure out where to eat. Whether it works depends entirely on whether Apple can populate those lists with anything you’d actually trust.
Find My is becoming more nuanced about time. From this autumn, users will be able to share their location for a custom window, a few minutes, several hours, multiple days, or until a specific date and time. There’s also an option to pause sharing with individual contacts until the end of the day. The obvious use case Apple cites: keeping a surprise birthday party under wraps.
iOS 27 New Features for Wallet, Pay and Music
Apple Wallet’s headline addition is receipt scanning powered by Apple Intelligence. Point your iPhone camera at a receipt, and the feature identifies individual items, calculates each person’s share of taxes and tips, and routes repayment through Messages or Wallet. Wallet is also gaining support for physical loyalty and membership cards, scan a barcode or a digital card to save it directly. Passes can be pinned to the Apple Watch Smart Stack, and hotel key functionality is expanding so guests at participating properties can access trip details, activity schedules, and real-time updates from within Wallet.
Apple Pay is getting a redesigned checkout flow that lets users swipe between cards while seeing rewards balances and pay-later options. Later this year, Apple says users will be able to add funds directly to eligible debit cards through Wallet or at checkout. A new merchant-facing feature called Tap to Share lets customers securely hand over loyalty account details, shipping addresses, or contact information with a single tap.
Apple Music is expanding Lyrics Translation to cover seven additional language pairings, adding English translations for French, German, Italian, Korean, Spanish, and Japanese tracks. Lyrics Pronunciation, which displays phonetic lyrics to help users sing along in unfamiliar languages, is extending to five new language pairings. AutoMix, the automatic song-transition feature, gains more immersive mixes and expands to Apple TV and HomePod. Apple TV 4K users with compatible audio systems will also get Hi-Res Lossless Audio through Apple Music.
Notes Gets Genuinely Useful, With a Few Caveats
Notes is quietly earning its keep in iOS 27. A new ‘Copy as Markdown’ option appears when selecting formatted text: tap the right arrow in the Cut/Copy/Paste menu and it’s there, ready to export cleanly to any Markdown-friendly app. For anyone who bounces between Apple Notes and a writing tool, that’s the kind of friction-removal that makes a real difference, according to MacRumors.
On iPhone 15 Pro and newer, the Siri AI version of Siri can now create Notes populated with generated content. Ask it to list every iPhone model compatible with iOS 27, for instance, and it will pull the information from the internet and build the note for you.
There are rough edges, as you’d expect from a beta. Apple’s own iOS and iPadOS 27 Beta Release Notes flag a known issue where non-SF Symbol custom images for app entities may not always surface in Siri. Home Intelligence, meanwhile, is only available for developer testing on iPhone and iPad in this release; EU customers will have to wait for a future iOS 27 update. There’s also a known issue where some data sent to Private Cloud Compute won’t appear in the Apple Intelligence Report for Home Intelligence under the current beta build.
Elsewhere, Podcasts gains a ‘search within show’ function across iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Vision Pro, and the web, plus video podcast support on Mac and Apple TV. iCloud Shared Albums adds full-resolution sharing, emoji reactions, temporary albums for short-term events, and web-based contributions from non-Apple users. Fitness+ launches a three-week ‘Strong Through Menopause’ programme of Yoga and Strength workouts aimed at people navigating perimenopause.
Developers can test all of this through the Apple Developer Programme now, with the public beta due next month. The Xcode 27 Beta Release Notes confirm the accompanying SDK covers iOS 27, iPadOS 27, tvOS 27, macOS 27, and visionOS 27. The real test, as ever, comes in the autumn, when the features have to survive contact with actual users rather than developer sandboxes.
