As part of the release of the 27.3 developer betas yesterday, Apple announced a substantial expansion of the capabilities of Siri AI. As you recall from my iOS 27 review two months ago, Siri AI launched with support for a limited subset of app domains based on schemas that Apple specifically optimized for the first version of Siri AI. In a major reversal for a mid-cycle update to Siri AI, that limitation is entirely going away: the updated Siri AI will instead work with any kind of app that supports any custom App Intent – as long as the developers do the work of modernizing their App Intents and integrating with Siri. Effectively, though, any app can work with Siri AI now, and Apple calls this the Siri AI Developer Preview.
Posts tagged with "iOS 27"
Siri AI’s Evolution Is Both Surprising and Obvious
Apple Releases iOS and iPadOS 27.2 with Apple Pencil Support for iPhone Duo and Smarter Siri
It’s been just six weeks since iOS and iPadOS 27 were released, but Apple just introduced version 27.2, which packs a surprisingly long list of new features, some of which were first announced back in June at WWDC, while others support the iPhone Duo. Let’s take a look at the highlights.
The iPhone Duo already has a couple of great updates. The first is support for the Apple Pencil (USB-C). That’s the model that reveals a USB-C port when you pull on the end of it. I played around with the Duo’s Apple Pencil support over the weekend and think a lot of people are going to love it. The Duo feels so much like a tiny notebook already that writing with the Pencil is very natural whether you’re using Apple’s Notes or Freeform, or one of the many new skeuomorphic note-taking apps that have been released for the Duo.
The Duo also gained support for Edge Light, which frames your Duo’s screen in a faux ring light, illuminating your face when you’re on a video call or filming yourself with the front-facing camera.
One of the limitations of the initial beta release of Siri AI was its lack of access to past conversations. With iOS and iPadOS 27.2, Siri can recall past conversations (English only), which is great, especially if you use Siri a lot. Siri has added new data sources too, like images attached in the Messages app, voicemail, and Calendar event attendees, along with better browsing history and Reading List results. Siri AI has also added a centralized setting for excluding apps from its results, along with beta support for French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish.
FaceTime has added new features too. Dual Capture, which streams the front and rear cameras of recent iPhones at the same time, now works in Group FaceTime calls. Third-party sign language interpreters or live captioners can be added to a call too, an accessibility feature that I first saw demoed back in May.
Messages has added suggested actions, like adding an event to Calendar, that draw on the context of your conversation. The feature showed up over the summer during the public beta but didn’t make the final release of iOS 27. It’s not a feature I use a lot, but for quickly capturing information in other apps when you’re pressed for time, it can really be handy.
Other iOS and iPadOS 27.2 updates include:
- Shared Albums in Photos include reminders before they expire, so you can save photos and videos before the deadline. The feature also adds caption and comment editing.
- Podcasts’ Up Next section has been organized into New Episodes and Continue Playing, to help differentiate active from untouched episodes.
- Games has added context on friend suggestions and now shows what friends are playing on their player pages.
- Apple TV’s Multiview has expanded to the iPhone, allowing you to watch four Apple TV sporting events at once, an especially nice option for the iPhone Duo.
Of these, I expect that I’ll use the Apple Pencil support for the iPhone Duo and Apple Podcasts’ Up Next categories the most, but given the variety of the release, I suspect there’s a little something for most users here.
Today’s updates are available by navigating to Settings > General > Software Update.
A Day with the iPhone Duo: First Impressions
I spent Wednesday in New York, interviewing developers about their iPhone Duo apps. It was like a little slice of WWDC dropped among Manhattan’s skyscrapers, which was wonderful. There’s nothing I enjoy about what we do at MacStories more than talking to developers about their apps and the stories behind them.
I left the city with a much better appreciation for what it’s like to build apps for the Duo, which will be incredibly valuable as Federico and I work our way through the enormous list of Duo apps that developers have shared with us. I also left New York with a 512GB Night Sky iPhone Duo for testing. As I left the press event, I suddenly had a phone to set up, but hadn’t done anything to prepare and had no fast Wi-Fi to download gigabytes of apps and files. Long story short (listen to MacStories Unwind for the long version), I headed to the airport and by the time I boarded the plane, I was on the iOS 27.2 beta and had the core system apps installed.
So, suffice it to say that this is not a review of the iPhone Duo. I haven’t had it much more than 24 hours, so I haven’t fully settled into a routine with it. That said, I wanted to share my first impressions and some early surprises.
Our Favorite Indie Apps for iOS 27, Vol. 3
We have another collection our favorite indie apps that take advantage of Apple’s latest OS features. Today, we’re highlighting: Haven, Structured, Capture, Scrappy, and Fin.
Haven
Haven is a HomeKit and Matter pairing code utility by João Franco for the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch that added Siri AI features this fall. The app is exactly what you want with this sort of utility because it makes storing codes for safekeeping fast and easy. Later when you need to re-pair a smart plug behind a couch or a lightbulb in a hard-to-reach spot, you’ll be glad you dropped the codes into Haven.
Retrieving codes is made even simpler, thanks to Haven’s Siri AI integration. Just ask for a code based on the name of your device in Haven, and Siri will fetch the code for you without opening the app. The feature works with both HomeKit and Matter codes and is compatible with natural language queries. The app also supports tagging and the ability to use Apple Intelligence to suggest a tag from among your existing tags.
In addition to the new Apple Intelligence and Siri AI features, Haven can track the home where your device is installed, its room, category, brand, model, serial number, protocol, power source, and status. You can mark items as favorites and add notes and attachments, like a photo of the device, too.
That’s a lot, which will appeal to the HomeKit nerds out there, but as a free download that offers unlimited pairing codes for just $6.99, it’s worth setting up Haven even if all you do is name your device, add the room where it’s located, and then search for it when needed via Siri. Siri AI is perfect for databases, and as anyone who is deep into the HomeKit world knows, a database is the best way to keep your smart home humming.
Structured
I had the pleasure of meeting the Structured team at WWDC this year. It was fun to walk through the app with them, learning about all their plans for the summer development season. But it’s been even more fun to actually play with the final product on the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch.
Structured is a day planning app with a beautiful and unique design that made it a finalist for both the 2025 iPad App of the Year Award and an Apple Design Award. I have a bad habit of overstuffing my workday, which is precisely the problem that Structured is designed to solve by visualizing your day and work on a timeline. The app can integrate with Reminders, your calendars, handle recurring tasks, start focus timers, and more.
As for Siri AI, Apple’s assistant can now assist Structured users with creating and editing tasks. There’s also a color prediction feature that’s in beta that learns from your past color choices to help suggest the color of a new task. Plus, Structured got a Liquid Glass update, which makes the app feel right at home among other modern apps without sacrificing the app’s simple design and legibility. If you need help organizing your day and want to see everything in one place, you can’t go wrong with Structured.
Scrappy
I’m always on the lookout for new ways to save random things I find on the Internet. I’m a digital hoarder by nature because you never can be sure when a link, image, or article that piques your curiosity will become something more in the future. The trouble is keeping these sort of bucket apps organized.
With Scrappy, by developer Steve Harris, you can save it all: notes, images, PDFs, links, videos, photos, screenshots, and more. Harris is also the developer of Keep It a notebook and document organizer app that we’ve covered on MacStories before. There are similarities between Keep It and Scrappy, but the thing that unique about Scrappy is that it’s much more visual.
The app, which works on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, puts a handy shelf just off the edge of your Mac’s screen where you can drag items, and across all platforms, it feautures fast search and smart lists. Plus, thanks to Siri AI, you can search and open what you’ve saved and create and edit notes. There are filtering and sorting options, along with an extraordinarily long set of Shortcuts actions that make the app uniquely suited for automation. Scrappy also has a wonderfully modern card interface that takes advantage of Liquid Glass, and it displays previews of links, images, and other content. There are lots of “bucket apps” on the App Store, but Scrappy is one of my favorites.
Capture
Apps like Capture are a unique obsession of mine as the online world relentlessly accelerates. Capture acts as an inbox for text, links, images, files, and tasks that works on the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Vision Pro, and Apple Watch. While you can store information in Capture long-term, it’s really meant to act as an inbox because the app has nearly 60 integrations with other third-party apps.
Capture has been building a deep library of integrations for a long time now, which I appreciate. It’s the sort of user-first approach that also made the app a perfect fit for App Intents. That integration makes it simple to find, create, and edit items with Siri. There is also an extensive set of Shortcuts actions, making the app a great fit for cross-app automations. Capture also offers creating, finding, and editing via Siri AI, note transcription using Apple’s on-device model, and a voice-based agentic mode.
Fin
Finally, I want to shout out Fin, the personal budgeting app for iPhone, iPad, Vision Pro, and Apple Watch. Getting data into a budgeting app quickly and easily makes all the difference in the world when it comes to sticking to your budget. Fin excels at quickly recording and organizing your expenses in a clear, colorful interface that takes advantage of Apple’s modern design language.
With the latest version, Fin adds onscreen awareness that lets you ask Siri questions about what’s onscreen. The app also exposes transactions and accounts to Spotlight making it easy to pinpoint data in both. Plus, Fin lets you search, import, export, and add data to the app using Siri. There’s an extra large chart widget too. If you’re looking for a simple on-device way to privately manage your expenses, Fin’s a great choice.
Deflector Turns iOS 27 Notification Triggers into a Shortcut Launcher
In my iOS and iPadOS 27 review, I wrote about one of the more interesting additions to the Shortcuts app for power users: automation triggers based on the contents of push notifications received on your device. As I explained, with this new trigger, you can create automations that run certain actions whenever a notification from a specific app, ideally containing a specific title or body text, arrives on your iPhone and iPad.
iPhone Duo App Submissions Are Open→
Yesterday, Apple announced on its developer blog that it has begun taking App Store submissions for iPhone Duo apps. The new foldable phone will be in customers’ hands in just over two weeks on October 23 and with Xcode 27.1, developers can recompile existing apps and build new ones.
To prepare for the launch, Apple has provided links to design and App Store asset guidance, as well as submitting apps to App Store Connect.
Also, if you’re a developer, don’t forget to check out Federico’s Frames CLI 1.5.0, which includes experimental support for the iPhone Duo. The feedback from developers has been that it saves a lot of time when preparing screenshots for the App Store. The Frames CLI is available on GitHub and there’s more information on MacStories here.
Our Favorite Indie Apps for iOS 27, Vol. 2
It’s time to get back to our favorite indie apps that take advantage of Apple’s latest OS features. Today, we’re highlighting: Bear, Gentler Streak, The Outsiders, DoMarks, and Cheatsheet Notes.
John
Bear
Bear, the note-taking app for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch, just released version 2.10 with several Siri AI features, including actions to:
- Create a new note
- Append text to an existing note
- Append files to a note
- Pin notes
The app also includes onscreen awareness so Siri knows the content of the note you’re looking at without you telling it.
Bear’s new actions make it a compelling way to dictate notes on the go. Simply invoke Siri and start talking. With the ability to start a new note or append to existing notes, you can get quite a lot done with only your voice. One of my favorite uses is annotating screenshots. I take a screenshot, invoke Siri, and in one go, I can ask it to add a new note with my last photo (the screenshot), give it a title, and add a quick note about it. It’s far easier than walking through those steps manually.
Gentler Streak
Our iPhones and the Apple Watch can collect and process a lot of health and fitness data for us. My favorite way of making sense of it all is Gentler Streak, which works on the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, making sense of all that data.
One of Gentler Streak’s greatest strengths is its delightful illustrations and clear, meaningful presentation of fitness data. I love browsing my workouts and other fitness data in Gentler Streak, but with the latest release, I’ve come to appreciate the snippets it offers thanks to App Intents, too.
The update lets you access bite-sized snippets of data without opening Gentler Streak, accessing data like today’s workout, your activity status, and suggested activities all from Spotlight or Siri. It’s handy when you’re in a hurry and just want a quick update on something like how well you slept last night. The app also supports onscreen awareness, allowing Siri to explain features of Gentler Streak to you or interpret onscreen data.
The Outsiders
The Outsiders, from the same team as Gentler Streak, is a great complement to it, trading Gentler Streak’s relaxed approach to workouts for a more intense, performance-driven perspective. I’m a big fan of the iPhone app’s colorful design, which, like Gentler Streak, lets you access data like your training readiness, latest workout, body metrics, and sleep data simply by asking for the data “in The Outsiders.” Onscreen awareness allows Siri to explain metrics to you, too.
If you choose to edit a workout’s title, Apple Intelligence kicks in with a suggestion changing something generic like “Evening Workout” into “Evening Commute Through Davidson College,” which sounds much nicer and adds a little hint about where you were and what you did for that workout.
Cheatsheet Notes
I love how Cheatsheet Notes has evolved over the years from a very basic scratchpad to a beautifully designed and focused note-taking app that adopts all of Apple’s latest technologies. The recent update, which is available for the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Mac (sold separately) is no exception, incorporating all sorts of Siri AI features, as well as new widgets.
Thanks to Siri AI’s onscreen awareness, you can ask Siri questions about information visible in your notes. You can also append text and images to notes with Siri’s help. The append functionality is especially useful because Cheatsheet is intended for quick notes about things you want to remember, like a parking spot at the airport. Take a quick photo of your parking spot, ask Siri to add it to your Airport Parking note and that’s it.
Cheatsheet has also added extra-large widgets that can display a list of notes, a set of notes tied to action buttons, a shuffling of notes from any folder, or a single note. Of course, the app also supports an extensive list of Shortcuts actions, too.
If you’re looking for a great place to store the sort of information you might otherwise scribble on scraps of paper, check out Cheatsheet Notes. It’s an excellent app and scraps of paper is no way to live.
DoMarks
With the release of Apple’s OS updates, DoMarks reached version 4.0. The app is based on the simple idea that people save links to do something with them later. DoMarks makes that easy by helping you assign an action category to each URL you save whether it’s to buy, read, watch, or do something else with the URL. The app fills a role that’s similar to a read-later app and can be used for reading, but the beauty of it is that what you do with the links you save for later is only limited by your own imagination.
With DoMarks’ Siri AI integration, you can save a webpage from Safari simply by asking Siri to save it to DoMarks. You can also ask Siri to open a link by its name or delete it. DoMarks supports onscreen awareness, allowing you to ask questions about a bookmark, too.
Other actions available via Siri, include keyword searches and opening a bookmark. However my favorite action is “Surprise Me in DoMarks,” which will open one of your saved bookmarks at random in Safari. It’s a great way to rediscover interesting spots on the web that I came across long ago, but didn’t have the time to look at. The app has also added a long list of Shortcuts actions that makes powerful automations possible too.
I’m a link hoarder (shocking, I know), and I’ve always found it hard to know what to do with links for things I want to check out later that aren’t reading material. DoMarks is the perfect way to handle those sorts of links, and now, it’s easier than ever to build your collection of bookmarks with Siri’s help.
Our Favorite Indie Apps for iOS 27, Vol. 1
With our annual OS reviews out of the way, Federico and I will be covering our favorite indie apps that take advantage of Apple’s latest OS features. We have hundreds to draw from and instead of one big sweeping roundup, we’re going to do a bunch of smaller ones as we work our way through our lists.
To start with, we have six excellent apps that make use of Siri AI, Apple Intelligence, extra-large widgets, and more. There’s a lot of innovation packed into this group, so let’s dive into the details, and check back soon for more roundups.
Federico
Things
Cultured Code’s beautiful task manager is no stranger to supporting major Apple OS releases: while the company is keeping quiet on their plans for a possible Things 4 (Things 3 was released in May 2017), for the past nine years Things has regularly received support for new versions of iOS, iPadOS, and macOS on day one. The app’s iOS 27 update is no exception, and it makes for a great demo of some of the new features of Siri AI as well as XL widgets for iPhone. It also serves as an example of the limitations of Siri AI – and not because of Cultured Code.
The updated Things app integrates with Siri AI and Spotlight, allowing you to retrieve and open tasks from anywhere on iOS and iPadOS, as well as manage tasks with the assistant using its several input methods. In my tests, Cultured Code’s integration worked well, but Apple’s slow on-device indexing was the problem. Soon after installing the app, I was able to ask Siri to create a reminder, and it prompted me to pick a destination app again because I’d installed a few more task managers since I last confirmed my previous choice. After picking Things, I was able to create a task, which landed in the inbox, and then follow-up with Siri AI by saying “make it due at 3 PM”, and it worked.
The issues I ran into, which are outside of Cultured Code’s control, are due to how long it takes iOS 27 and Siri AI to build an index of the app’s capabilities and data structure. For instance, I created an ‘iOS 27 Review’ list in Things, but, after three hours, Siri AI still can’t find it. As I noted in my review, I believe this is going to be a major challenge for most third-party apps in the short term as users download them, expect them to work with Siri, but the indexing isn’t going quickly enough.
Regardless of Apple’s technical problems, Things’ integration with Siri AI shows the path forward for third-party task managers on iOS. I also recommend reading the developers’ guide on how to prompt Siri AI for the app.
Locally AI
I covered the differences between Apple’s two flavors of local Foundation models (AFM 3 Core and 3 Core Advanced) in yesterday’s review, but there’s no better way to actually take the model for a spin than Locally AI.
The app, which is now part of the LM Studio family of products and can connect to a remote Mac using LM Link, now offers an ‘Apple Foundation Advanced’ model that, assuming you have a compatible device, lets you prompt Apple’s new on-device model.
A good way to prompt this model is to give it an image: for the first time, a local Foundation model comes with vision capabilities, and I’ve found Core Advanced to be surprisingly strong at describing things like iPhone screenshots, selfies with different facial expressions, and more. Obviously, it comes with limits: Locally AI’s harness doesn’t expose tools to the model, which means it can’t fetch web content and, say, summarize articles for you in the app. Its knowledge and creativity are also quite limited, as you can see from the non-joke it created in the screenshot above.
Still, despite the limitations of the model itself, Locally AI is an excellent utility for running local models on iPhone and iPad, and if you’re curious to see what Apple’s bigger models feels like outside of Siri AI with your own prompts, I recommend checking it out.
Dark Noise
Charlie Chapman’s Dark Noise has long been my favorite utility to play white noise and other sound effects to relax or focus, and the app has received a substantial update for iOS 27 worth checking out.
First, there’s a good-looking new Liquid Glass player that fluidly morphs on-screen from a mini-player docked at the bottom of the app into a full-screen view that lets you control playback, volume, and set a sleep timer. On the Home Screen, there’s a (customizable) XL portrait widget for iPhone that lets you configure any combination of up to 24 distinct sounds and mixes that you can play with a single tap without opening the app.
As you can imagine, the app also integrates with Siri AI now. Using Apple’s assistant, you can ask to play specific sounds from the app (make sure to add “…from Dark Noise” to your request) and you can also leverage on-screen awareness inside the app itself. While looking at your list of favorites and mixes, for instance, you can say something like “play the second mix”, and since Chapman has properly annotated the app’s views, Siri AI and Dark Noise will know what you mean.
If you, like me, struggle to get work done with music in the background but also do not appreciate complete silence, I recommend installing Dark Noise and creating a few mixes of your own.
AskPlay
I first covered Francisco Cantu’s AskPlay when it debuted on the Mac earlier this year in the App Radar for Club members, where I wrote:
Created by indie developer Francisco Cantu (a name that should be familiar to longtime MacStories readers!), AskPlay is one of the best new Mac apps I’ve tried in a long time, and we will properly review it on MacStories in the near future. The idea is simple: AskPlay gives you natural language control over Apple Music to play or queue songs. The app, which lives in the menu bar but can also be invoked with a system-wide hotkey, brings up a Spotlight-like floating search box where you can type or say things like, “Queue some ‘90s hip-hop,” or, “Play something like Oasis,” and have an AI carry out the request.
The app can build mixes for a mood or era, start stations, manage the queue (you can ask to move songs up or down), control playback, and add songs to your library or playlists, and it also answers questions such as, “Who sings this?” You can either type your requests or set a voice hotkey that summons the app already listening, pausing your music while you speak. AskPlay is a bring-your-own-key app, so you’ll need an API key from OpenAI, Anthropic, or OpenRouter in addition to an Apple Music subscription (and a subscription to the app itself).
AskPlay is now on iPhone too, and thanks to iOS 27, it’s become one of my favorite showcases of Apple’s Cloud Pro Foundation model running in Private Cloud Compute. Unlike the original version, AskPlay now lets you hand off prompt processing to a reasoning model in the cloud at no cost thanks to Apple’s PCC framework for third-party developers. And not only that, but AskPlay is also the first app I’ve seen that lets you choose between the three reasoning modes supported on PCC: light, moderate, and deep.
In my experience, I’ve had the best results with the PCC model set to “moderate” reasoning. What this means in practice is that with AskPlay for iOS 27, we now have a way to generate Apple Music-based mixes using natural language with a quality that I find superior to Apple Music’s own playlist generation feature.
AskPlay remains one of the best app debuts of the year, and if you want to demo the capabilities of Private Cloud Compute for third-party apps, you should start here.
LookUp 13
LookUp 13 from Vidit Bhargava has been released with a wide variety of features that make use of iOS and iPadOS 27. The app, which is available on the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Vision Pro, makes great use of Siri AI, allowing you to quickly ask Siri things like “Search the word plethora in LookUp,” which opens the app right to that word. Siri can also be used to find LookUp’s word of the day or a random word.
Beyond Siri, Vidit has added support for Apple Intelligence in the notes that can be tied to a word and combined Apple’s Foundation Models with the Vision framework and hand-pose tracking to let you scan a printed page for a word. Point at a word and the app’s scan mode uses your device’s camera to see which word you’re pointing at. It took a little practice to figure out the right distance from the camera to the page, but once I got that down, it felt like magic. The same feature can pick out other nearby words that might be difficult for the reader, too.
LookUp 13 also offers a Reading Mode that looks up words you speak as you read. The feature uses a Live Activity that listens to you speak, and returns a definition. Initially I ran into some trouble with Reading Mode, but when I tried again later, it worked every time. Also included in the latest release are interactive flash cards that ask for word definitions that are graded by Private Cloud Compute and new extra-large widgets for the word of the day and a shuffled word of the day.
LookUp is an excellent app. I love how Vidit continues to push the boundaries of Apple’s technologies every year, and while I hit a few rough spots in testing, which struck me as issues with Siri AI, not LookUp, I’m impressed by how much depth LookUp’s new Apple Intelligence features add to the app.
Play
The latest update to Play, the watch-it-later app from Marcos Tanaka that works on the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Vision Pro, and Apple TV, includes a bunch of great touches. There’s a new Channels Inbox for navigating saved videos by source. Play has also added Siri AI support allowing you to search for and open videos. Onscreen content is made available to Siri, so you can do things like ask it to remind you to finish a video later, and it knows what you mean. In my testing, all three features work well.
Also, on an individual video’s detail view, you can use Apple Intelligence to create a summary of a video. There are options ranging from a concise summary to a simple explanation. I ran into a roadblock when I tried to create a summary of a fifteen-year-old YouTube video, but more recent videos all worked well. Apple Intelligence can also suggest tags and icons for videos and lets you ask questions, with the answers drawn from the video’s transcript.
Beyond Siri AI and Apple Intelligence, Play adds an extra large widget, a refreshed Liquid Glass design that I love, and Spotlight search. It’s a fantastic update to my favorite way to save videos for later.
Our OS 27 Review Extras: eBooks, Shortcuts, and the Making of the iOS and iPadOS 27 Review
Today we published not one, but three reviews covering four OSes:
- Federico’s iOS and iPadOS 27 review, which is packed with special interactive touches
- John’s macOS 27 and watchOS 27 reviews
The reviews cover design, new app features and more, which kicks off a big week here at MacStories that includes extra special perks for Club MacStories members. Here’s what we have planned.
For Club MacStories members, we’ve got some exciting perks to help you get more out of the reviews:
- An eBook edition of Federico’s iOS and iPadOS 27: The MacStories Review that you can download and read on your favorite device or app
- 20 additional ready-made shortcuts for iOS 27
- An eBook edition of John’s macOS 27 Golden Gate review
- An eBook edition of John’s watchOS 27 review.
If you’re not already a member, you can join Club MacStories for $5/month or $50/year using the buttons below: