Here’s why I’m optimistic about iOS 27 and Apple’s renewed focus on stability

This year, Apple is rumored to be doing a code cleanup for iOS 27, with an overall focus on stability and performance, in addition to a plethora of Apple Intelligence features. While that sounds good on its own, I think there’s a bigger reason why we should expect an incredibly stable release.

Love it or hate it, agent coding has dramatically accelerated the software development process. Towards the end of last year the models started to get remarkably good, and we’re now at a point where you can run a model reliably on entire tasks and generally handle them well. And, according to Mark Gurman, Apple is committed to using anthropogenic models for product development.

Does this mean we’re going to see a slime-filled iOS 27? Most likely not. I still expect Apple to have its usual level of hesitation about new technology. Engineers are still (hopefully) reviewing every line of code – but the fact that it’s allowed for internal use is a good sign.

The prospect that engineers can use Claude to manage the low-hanging fruit and focus all their energy on difficult problems is incredibly exciting. Especially since, for the most part, iOS 27 will have few features apart from Siri and Apple Intelligence. In theory, this means that most teams will be able to work harder to improve their performance.

Conclude

There have been so many rumors over the year that Apple was focusing on performance on iOS, and often it amounts to next to nothing. This year though, I’m feeling incredibly optimistic about it. Historically, Apple has faced a software engineer bottleneck, but if every engineer is much more productive with AI, perhaps much more will be done this year. We can hope.

Are you looking forward to WWDC26 next month? What are you most passionate about? Let us know in the comments.

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