iOS 27

iOS 27 to include code cleanup and interface tweaks in hopes to boost battery life: report

Michael Burkhardt | Feb 15 2026 - 5:29 am PT

In today’s edition of the Power On newsletter, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman shared a number of new details about Apple’s upcoming software release: iOS 27. The company is aiming to ‘tidy’ its codebase, upgrade older apps, and tweak Liquid Glass – and as a result, battery life should hopefully improve.

It’s been previously reported that iOS 27 would mostly focus on performance improvements and stability. However, today’s report includes three key details on how the company will accomplish that:

Removing ‘scraps’ of old code
Some interface ‘tweaks’, but nothing massive
Subtly upgrading old apps to ‘let them perform better’

In the report, Gurman describes iOS as ‘a bit of the mess under the hood’. If you’ve used any of Apple’s software in recent years – you’ve definitely noticed an uptick in bugs, poor performance at times, and less battery life. Apple’s software quality used to be one of its strong suits, so the recent decay has been disappointing at times to say the least.

Top comment by IndomitableSlake

Liked by 12 people

Apple’s three mobile OSes do need a “Snow Leopard” update across the board, but I’m having trouble envisioning how they’d go about that. There hasn't been an architectural change, so there’s only so much code that can be optimized. They make their own hardware, so they could build chips explicitly to take advantage of the Swift mode of operation and then fully rewrite all the code for all their apps in Swift alone. But that’s a massive undertaking.

Honestly, “feature bloat” may just be something they’ll have to address.

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With all of this code cleanup across the board, Gurman reports that engineers are also working towards providing better battery life:

The company hopes that underlying code changes will result in efficiency gains that will end up giving users more juice. If Apple does indeed pull off these improvements, it’s unclear if the company will market the changes — or if this is just a benefit of cleaning things up.

Lastly, Apple is also focusing on improving its AI features in iOS 27. Recently, Bloomberg reported that some of Apple’s key Siri promises made at WWDC 2024 would be delayed to iOS 27. We’ve also heard Apple is working towards a Siri chatbot of sorts for iOS 27, though it’s likely there’ll be even more to come as we get closer to the keynote in June.

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Michael Burkhardt mbrkhrdt

Michael is a 9to5Mac Reporter, leading all of our Apple news coverage on weekends and reviewing the newest Apple products and accessories. He got started in the world of Apple news during the pandemic, and it became a growing hobby. He’s also an indie iOS developer, and started the weekly Indie App Spotlight series, which has covered hundreds of blooming new apps since it launched. In his free time, he enjoys shooting street photography around New York City on his Sony A7RV.

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