WWDC 2026: What to Expect From iOS 27 and the New Siri

Apple has spent the better part of two years apologising for Siri. The smarter, more personal assistant it promised back in 2024 never properly turned up, features kept slipping, and the whole Apple Intelligence story started to feel like a promise Apple could not quite keep. WWDC 2026 is where that has to change, and the keynote on Monday 8 June is shaping up to be the most important software event the company has held in years.

So here is what I am watching for, what the reporting points to for iOS 27, and why a quieter, less flashy year might be exactly what Apple needs right now. A lot of the granular detail below comes from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, whose full WWDC preview is worth reading if you want the complete rundown.

When is the WWDC 2026 keynote?

The keynote starts at 10am Pacific on Monday 8 June, which is 6pm here in the UK. It is being held at Apple Park, and you can stream it live on Apple.com, the Apple TV app and Apple's YouTube channel. The conference itself runs through to 12 June, but the keynote is the bit everyone actually cares about, since that is where Apple turns a year of internal work into something the rest of us can see.

A Snow Leopard year, and I am here for it

The interesting thing about iOS 27 is what it is not. After last year's Liquid Glass overhaul, Apple is reportedly stepping back from big visual changes and focusing on reliability instead, with better battery life, faster performance and fewer of the bugs that have crept in lately. Gurman compares it to Mac OS X Snow Leopard in 2009 and iOS 12 in 2018, both of which were quieter releases that mostly tidied up what came before.

That suits me. I spend my whole working day inside these apps, and I would take a phone that lasts longer and stops glitching over another round of redesigns any day of the week. macOS 27 is apparently getting the same treatment, including fixes for the shadow and transparency quirks in Tahoe that made some text properly hard to read.

The new Siri is the whole story

Everything else is a sideshow compared to Siri, especially after the team behind the revamp lost its lead just before the show. The reporting suggests Apple is finally turning Siri from a clumsy voice-control system into a proper conversational assistant that can handle tasks across iPhone, iPad and Mac, and crucially one that can tap into your own data: your emails, calendar, contacts and notes. These are the same personal-context features Apple demoed in 2024 and then quietly delayed, so the pressure to actually ship them this time is enormous.

A few changes stand out to me. You will reportedly be able to fire several requests at Siri in one go, like checking the weather, adding a calendar event and sending a message in a single prompt. There is also a dedicated Siri app coming to all three platforms for holding and revisiting conversations, which finally puts Apple on the same footing as the ChatGPT and Claude apps people already use. And a new Search or Ask panel, opened by swiping down from the top of the screen, looks set to become the main way you search and get things done.

Siri is reportedly being powered by Google's Gemini

This is the part that will get the most attention, and rightly so. Apple is said to be paying Google a reported one billion dollars a year to use a custom Gemini model as the brains behind the new Siri, with much of it hosted on Google's servers rather than Apple's own. For a company that has built its entire brand on privacy, handing the assistant's intelligence to Google is an awkward look, and I expect Apple to spend a fair chunk of the keynote reassuring people about how their data is handled.

My take is that it is the pragmatic call. Apple was clearly not going to catch up on its own in time, and a borrowed model that works beats an in-house one that does not. But the messaging on Monday matters, because private by design and running on Google are not the easiest two ideas to hold together.

The creator angle: photos, Visual Intelligence and Shortcuts

If you make content, this is the section to pay attention to. Apple has been quietly threading AI through the system for a while now, right down to its accessibility tools, and this year the reporting points to a meaningful upgrade to its AI photo features. That includes a long-overdue fix for Clean Up, which has been frustratingly unreliable since it launched, plus an Extend option for generating scenery beyond the edge of a frame, an Enhance feature for overall image quality, and a redesigned, much simpler Image Playground.

Two other things caught my eye. Visual Intelligence is reportedly moving deeper into the Camera app and gaining the ability to act on things like nutrition labels and contact details, which makes it far more useful day to day. And Shortcuts is supposedly getting natural-language building, so you can describe what you want an automation to do instead of assembling every step by hand. If that works as described, it lowers the barrier to automation enormously, and it is the first thing I will be testing the moment the beta drops.

What I will be watching on Monday

The single biggest question is not what Apple announces, but how finished it is. Gurman reports that the new Siri is being labelled beta and preview internally, with the possibility of a waitlist, which is exactly the language that surrounded the features Apple failed to deliver last time. After two years of slipped promises, a polished demo is not enough, and I want to know what actually ships this autumn alongside the new iPhones rather than what gets quietly pushed into 2027.

It is also worth remembering that the headline features are never the whole picture. Some of the most useful changes get no stage time at all, which is exactly why I keep a running list of the iPhone features Apple does not advertise. I will be adding to it the moment iOS 27 is in my hands.

If Apple gets this right, iOS 27 becomes the year Siri stops being a punchline. If it leans too hard on coming later, we are in for another long wait. I will be covering the keynote reactions live, so keep an eye out for my full breakdown once we have actually seen it.

FAQ

When does iOS 27 come out?

Apple is expected to preview iOS 27 at WWDC on 8 June, with a public release this autumn, most likely alongside the new iPhone and Apple Watch line-up.

Will the new Siri be available straight away?

Probably not in full. Reporting suggests Apple is treating the new Siri as a beta or preview, and there may be a waitlist for some features, so expect a staggered rollout rather than everything landing at once.

Will my iPhone support iOS 27?

Apple has not confirmed the supported devices yet. We will know the exact list once the keynote happens on 8 June, and I will update this post accordingly.