WWDC 2026: Complete iOS 27 SDK API Reference

Foundation Models is a new Apple framework introduced in iOS 27 that gives developers on-device access to the same Apple Intelligence language model powering system features, enabling text generation, structured output, and tool-calling entirely on-device without a network connection.

Core AI is a new iOS 27 framework that lets developers bring their own on-device AI models (vision transformers, LLMs, etc.) directly into apps, using the familiar FoundationModels session API. Models run entirely on-device with no cloud dependency, no per-token cost, and no data leaving the device.

SpotlightSearchTool is a new Foundation Models tool that lets a language model directly query your app's Core Spotlight index, enabling conversational, context-aware search over your app's own donated content. Developers can drop it into any LanguageModelSession to get AI-generated answers grounded in app data.

App Schemas let developers map their app's entities and actions to predefined Siri-understandable structures, grouped into App Schema Domains (e.g. messages, photos, mail), so Siri can find content, answer questions, and execute actions in natural language without any custom NLU code.

Dynamic profiles let you switch language models, instructions, and tools within a single LanguageModelSession, enabling multi-agent orchestration patterns like baton-pass and phone-a-friend directly in your app. Combined with session properties and lifecycle modifiers, you can build context-aware, multi-stage AI workflows on-device and in the cloud.

iOS 27 introduces GenerateIterativeSegmentationRequest in the Vision framework, letting users interactively isolate any object in an image by providing a point, bounding box, lasso, or scribble as a seed, then iteratively refine the resulting mask.

A new Apple framework for measuring the quality and reliability of intelligent features powered by generative AI. It integrates with Swift Testing to let developers define datasets, metrics, and optimization targets that automatically assess probabilistic outputs from language models.

A new on-device framework that analyzes audio files for musical properties including beat/rhythm, key signature, structure (sections/segments/phrases), pace, instrument activity, and loudness — all without requiring ML or signal processing expertise.

App Schemas let developers describe their app's content and actions using pre-defined domain schemas (like the Calendar domain) so Siri can understand, search, and act on app data without custom NLP. Entities conforming to IndexedEntity are donated to Spotlight's semantic index, enabling natural-language queries over app content.

iOS 27 opens the Foundation Models framework to third-party LLM providers via a new public LanguageModel protocol, enabling anyone to integrate custom, server-based, or open-source models using the same Swift API as Apple's on-device system model.

iOS 27 expands App Intents to deeply integrate with Siri's on-device language model, enabling natural-language invocation of app actions with richer parameter resolution and multi-step task chaining. Apps can now expose capabilities that Siri understands contextually without rigid phrase matching.

iOS 27 extends App Intents with new APIs for custom Siri dialog responses, interaction donations, OwnershipProvidingEntity for smart confirmations, and IndexedEntityQuery for semantic Spotlight indexing — enabling richer, more personal Siri and Apple Intelligence experiences.

iOS 27 introduces security patterns and APIs for protecting agentic features built with Foundation Models and App Intents, including lifecycle event modifiers to inject deterministic security checkpoints into LLM-driven agent execution loops.

iOS 27 opens the Foundation Models framework to third-party LLM providers via a new public LanguageModel protocol, allowing anyone to integrate server-based or local models (e.g. Claude, Gemini, CoreAI, MLX) using the same API as Apple's on-device system model.

Visual Intelligence brings iOS 17's Visual Look Up capabilities to a new developer-facing API surface in iOS 27, letting apps pipe live camera frames or static images through on-device scene understanding to extract subjects, text, barcodes, and rich semantic labels without any cloud round-trip.

Core AI is Apple's new on-device inference framework for iOS 27, giving developers direct access to the same high-performance ML execution engine that powers Apple Intelligence. It supports CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine across all Apple Silicon devices.

Visual Intelligence now lets apps register as image search providers via App Intents, returning matched entities when users highlight and search images. Introduced in iOS 26 and now expanded to iPadOS and macOS in iOS 27, apps can surface rich, ranked results directly in the Visual Intelligence UI.

A new Instruments template for the Foundation Models framework lets you record, visualize, and debug on-device and server-based LLM sessions — showing sessions, requests, model inferences, tool calls, token counts, and latency breakdowns in a single timeline.

MLX-LM Server exposes a locally running language model via an OpenAI-compatible HTTP API on your Mac, enabling fully offline agentic AI workflows — tool calling, multi-step reasoning, and concurrent subagents — with no cloud dependency. New in macOS 26, MLX targets dedicated Neural Accelerators on M5 for up to 4× faster prompt processing.

RAW 9 is a major new decoder version for CIRAWFilter that uses a tiled CoreML model running on the Apple Neural Engine to combine demosaicing and denoising in a single pass, dramatically improving sharpness, color accuracy, and noise reduction for hundreds of supported camera models.

macOS 26.2 introduces RDMA over Thunderbolt 5 and the JACCL collective communication library, enabling MLX to shard large language model inference and fine-tuning across multiple Apple Silicon Macs in a cluster. Developers can now run models too large for a single machine or dramatically accelerate token generation by spreading computation across up to N nodes with a single CLI flag.

macOS 27 ships a pre-installed `fm` command-line tool and a pip-installable Python SDK that expose the on-device Apple Foundation Model outside of Swift apps, enabling shell scripts, automation pipelines, and Python-based ML evaluation workflows.

TensorOps is a Metal Shading Language library that lets developers write optimized custom machine learning kernels—including matrix multiplication, convolution, and FlashAttention—with automatic hardware acceleration across all Apple Silicon GPU generations, including the new M5 neural accelerator. iOS/macOS 27 extends its quantized data type support to FP8, 2-bit integers, and MX scaling formats.

The Evaluations framework in iOS 27 lets developers iteratively improve AI-powered features by running structured evaluations, scoring outputs with a model judge, and measuring alignment between model and human ratings using Cohen's kappa coefficient. This hill-climbing workflow enables systematic prompt and feature quality improvement with confidence.

Core AI is Apple's new Python-based suite for converting, optimizing, and deploying PyTorch models on Apple Silicon. It covers the full lifecycle from torch.export through compression via coreai-opt to on-device inference, with a companion Core AI Debugger app for runtime inspection.

ImagePlayground.framework now generates high-quality, photorealistic images via Private Cloud Compute instead of on-device models, with a redesigned API that replaces the deprecated ImageCreator. Developers present a familiar sheet UI and receive a URL to the generated image.

iOS 27 introduces on-device AI-generated subtitles that automatically transcribe or translate audio/subtitles during video playback, plus a new subtitle style preview API that lets users audition caption styles without leaving the player.

The Evaluations framework in Xcode 27 lets developers generate and validate synthetic test data at scale using the SampleGenerator API, then run robust evaluations against agentic workflows that involve tool calling — all from Swift code.

MLX Swift is an open-source array computing framework for Apple platforms that lets you write mathematical code using n-dimensional arrays, with automatic GPU execution and automatic differentiation via function transformations like `grad`. It brings NumPy-style numerical computing to Swift with lazy evaluation and a clean, math-like API.

Liquid Glass is Apple's new material and visual design language introduced in iOS 27, bringing translucent, refractive glass-like surfaces to system and custom UI elements. It replaces the frosted vibrancy aesthetic with a more dynamic, depth-aware material that responds to content beneath it.

Xcode 27 introduces a fully customizable toolbar and theme system, untitled scratch projects, coding agent integration directly in the editor, and the new Device Hub for evaluating apps across simulators and physical devices side-by-side.

iOS 27 introduces new SwiftUI drag and drop APIs including reorderable, reorderContainer, dragContainer, and configuration modifiers that enable reordering within and across collections, multi-item drag, and fine-grained control over how data is transferred during drag and drop operations.

iOS 27 enforces stricter adaptivity requirements for UIKit apps, making iPhone apps fully resizable in iPhone Mirroring and on iPad, while introducing new navigation bar minimization controls, sidebar opt-in for iPhone tab bars, and prominent tab customization.

iOS 27 brings a sweeping set of SwiftUI enhancements including Liquid Glass design adoption, new toolbar visibility and overflow APIs, document architecture improvements with Observable, and resizable iPhone app support — all designed to modernize app UIs with minimal code changes.

iOS 27 adds PKStrokeRecognizer to PencilKit, enabling on-device handwriting recognition across 29 languages, plus Bézier path conversion, stable stroke identity, selection access, and programmatic stroke slicing APIs.

iOS 27 brings significant updates to Live Activities and the Dynamic Island, including new expanded presentations, richer interactivity via App Intents directly from the island, and updated layout APIs for more expressive minimal and compact views.

PaperKit is Apple's full-featured canvas framework — previously internal-only — now publicly available in iOS/macOS/visionOS 27. It powers the drawing and markup experience in Notes, Preview, and Freeform, giving developers access to a complete pencil, shapes, images, and text canvas with a rich data model.

Reality Composer Pro 3 introduces Animation Graph, Behavior Trees, Script Graph, Navigation Mesh, and Compute Graph — a suite of visual, node-based editors that let you author character animation, autonomous AI routines, interactivity, pathfinding, and particle effects entirely within the editor without writing code.

The Touch Controller framework lets you add fully customizable on-screen touch controls to your game that automatically surface as a GCController object, integrating directly with your existing Game Controller input pipeline and rendering via Metal.

iOS 27 (and macOS 15) brings the systemExtraLargePortrait widget family — previously visionOS-only — to iPhone, iPad, and Mac, giving widgets a tall canvas to display rich app content. Developers can now support this new family size alongside existing families with minimal code changes.

visionOS 27 introduces Gaussian Splatting support in RealityKit, enabling developers to scan real-world objects and render them as photorealistic 3D Gaussian splats directly in their spatial experiences. This bridges the gap between physical reality and virtual content without requiring manual 3D modeling.

Reality Composer Pro 3 introduces a node-based visual scripting system called Script Graph that lets developers and designers build interactive RealityKit experiences — including full games — without writing any code. Features include drag gesture events, physics integration, prototyped subgraphs, custom events, and live preview directly on Vision Pro.

iOS 26/27 introduces Liquid Glass, a new design language that separates apps into a UI layer (navigation, tab bars, toolbars) and a content layer (scroll views, imagery, color). This architecture lets brand color and content breathe edge-to-edge while native controls float above and dynamically pick up brand colors.

SwiftUI now makes it straightforward to compose rich, animated visual pipelines by combining Metal shaders (colorEffect, distortionEffect, layerEffect) with TimelineView for per-frame time-driven animation and alignment guides for precise floating-view attachment. These building blocks chain together like pipes to produce production-quality effects without needing a separate rendering engine.

Xcode plugins can now extend Reality Composer Pro 3 by registering custom ECS components, systems, animation actions, and Script Graph nodes so artists can iterate on 3D content directly inside the editor without rebuilding the app.

iOS 27 introduces updated search field placement patterns with Liquid Glass styling, including ergonomic bottom-toolbar search that animates over the keyboard, prominent Search Tab options, and adaptive toolbar search that collapses to a button on constrained layouts.

visionOS supports fully photo-realistic, spatially-aware 360° immersive environments with true depth, parallax, spatial audio, and motion — going far beyond static panoramas. Developers can now surface these environments on both native visionOS apps and the spatial web.

iOS/macOS 2026 adds NSGestureRecognizerRepresentable, NSHostingMenu, and NSHostingSceneRepresentation, making it easier than ever to incrementally adopt SwiftUI inside existing AppKit apps without a full rewrite. Observable tracking in NSView draw methods is also enabled by default.

tvOS 27 introduces system-wide Dynamic Type support, allowing users to choose preferred text sizes (Large through Accessibility XXXL) in Settings. Apps built with standard UIKit and SwiftUI text styles adapt automatically, while custom layouts can respond via the dynamicTypeSize environment value.

macOS 27 introduces NSTextSelectionManager for custom text selection in any view, while reinforcing best practices for gesture recognizers, keyboard navigation, and NSWindowRestoration to make AppKit apps feel native and resilient.

The HTML <model> element is a native browser element that lets web developers embed interactive 3D USDZ models in Safari on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS — no JavaScript library required. It was previously visionOS-only and now ships across all Apple platforms in iOS/iPadOS/macOS 2026.

iOS 27 introduces a new CarPlay video app category allowing users to browse and play videos on supported CarPlay displays, alongside major CarPlay framework enhancements including card thumbnails with overlays, a MiniPlayer for now playing, voice control overlays, and navigation panels.

iOS 27 adds soft shadow rendering to RealityKit spotlights and point lights via a configurable lightSize and quality, plus a SurroundingsLightComponent that lets virtual lights illuminate real-world surfaces using the scene understanding mesh.

Safari on visionOS now exposes a JavaScript immersive API that lets websites transport users into full 3D environments using the HTML model element, mirroring the Fullscreen API pattern with requestImmersive(). Developers can build inline 3D previews and seamless transitions into spatial environments directly from a webpage.

visionOS 27 introduces ClippingComponent and enhanced ManipulationComponent placement patterns in RealityKit, enabling multiple users in a SharePlay session to simultaneously manipulate, disassemble, and cross-section structured 3D assemblies in shared space.

Safari 27 introduces Customizable Select, allowing developers to apply `appearance: base-select` CSS to fully style the native HTML `<select>` element and its picker, including custom HTML content inside `<option>` elements, while retaining built-in accessibility and form semantics.

Xcode's coding agents let you generate multiple SwiftUI UI variations from a single descriptive prompt, enabling rapid design exploration directly in native code. Combined with Xcode Previews, you can iterate on layouts, animations, and real content states without leaving the IDE.

Reality Composer Pro 3 is a standalone tool (no longer bundled inside Xcode) that introduces live on-device preview, GPU-based Compute Graphs, a Lightmapping system for baked indirect lighting, a prototype/instancing workflow, and an AI Assistant that generates 3D objects and materials on demand for visionOS experiences.

iOS 27 introduces the `accessibilityLinkedGroup` SwiftUI modifier, which lets developers connect multiple separate text views so VoiceOver and Speak Screen navigate across them seamlessly as a single continuous reading experience.

iOS 27 introduces NSTextViewportRenderingSurface and NSTextViewportRenderingSurfaceKey protocols, and makes UITextView/NSTextView conform to NSTextViewportLayoutControllerDelegate — enabling developers to override viewport layout lifecycle methods to build rich extensions like line-number gutters without leaving the safety of framework text views.

CSS Grid Lanes is a new web layout mode available in Safari 26 that enables masonry-style layouts natively in CSS — no JavaScript required. Items flow into multiple columns or rows, each settling into the shortest available lane while preserving natural proportions.

MetricKit has been rebuilt from the ground up in iOS 27 with a contextually rich, Swift-first API that delivers metrics and diagnostics as async streams, plus new capabilities like Metal frame rate metrics, memory exception diagnostics, and per-state metric breakdowns via the StateReporting framework.

iOS 26+ introduces a Deferred Start API for AVCaptureSession that postpones initialization of non-preview outputs (like photo and movie outputs) until after the first preview frame renders, dramatically cutting camera app launch times.

iOS/macOS 27 introduces the StateReporting API and look-back trace collection tools, letting developers annotate game state (levels, graphics settings, network) directly into Metal performance traces and retroactively collect hours of performance data without pre-instrumentation.

Game Porting Toolkit 4 introduces agentic skills and a porting assistant that give AI coding agents (like Claude Code) the platform expertise needed to autonomously port games from D3D12/Windows to Metal/macOS, including new macOS 27 command-line tools gpucapture and gpudebug for fully autonomous GPU frame analysis.

Instruments 27 introduces Run Comparisons — a new mode that directly diffs two profiling traces side-by-side in a single document to calculate exact performance deltas — alongside the new Top Functions analysis mode that merges scattered call-tree nodes by self-weight to instantly surface the costliest functions regardless of call hierarchy.

iOS 27 rebuilds MetricKit from the ground up with a modern, Swift-first API that delivers metric and diagnostic reports via async streams, adds Metal frame rate metrics, memory exception diagnostics, and crash termination categories, plus a new StateReporting framework to contextualize metrics by app state.

Trust Insights is a new iOS 27 framework that provides behavioral context signals to help apps detect social engineering and coercion attacks. It uses on-device and cloud ML to assess whether a user may be coached by a scammer during sensitive operations like payments or account changes.

iOS 27 extends App Attest with launch validation category and bundle version extensions in the authenticator data, plus macOS 27 support and a new ACL Blob OID in the leaf certificate — giving servers richer signals to detect tampered or misused app copies.

iOS 27 enables developers to sell auto-renewable subscriptions to multiple people at once via in-app group purchases or volume purchasing through Apple Business/School Manager. Purchasers buy a set number of seats and share an invite link; StoreKit 2 handles the full seat-assignment lifecycle.

iOS 27 introduces a Product Page Header on the App Store — a dedicated visual area above screenshots where developers can place custom marketing images or videos. A new Asset Library in App Store Connect centralizes all creative assets and allows real-time updates to Product Page Headers and Search Result visuals without a new app submission.

Retention Messaging lets developers configure custom messages, images, and promotional offers that appear on the App Store cancellation page when a subscriber is about to cancel. It supports both static configuration via App Store Connect and real-time server-driven responses through the Retention Messaging API.

iOS 27 adds sectioned queries, codable model attributes, ResultsObserver for non-SwiftUI change observation, and HistoryObserver for reacting to persistent history changes in SwiftData.

USDKit is a new first-party Swift framework introduced in iOS/macOS 27 that brings native USD scene creation, composition, modification, and export capabilities to Apple platform apps, with deep RealityKit and Spatial Preview integration.

LiveCommunicationKit is the modern replacement for CXProvider that delivers rich, native conversation UIs integrated with the Lock Screen, Dynamic Island, Phone app Recents, and Siri. It provides a unified lifecycle model for audio and video conversations with a single delegate-driven action pipeline.

The NowPlaying framework introduces a first-class Swift API for surfacing app media in system-wide now-playing surfaces — Lock Screen, Control Center, Dynamic Island, StandBy, CarPlay, Apple Watch, and Apple TV — via a declarative MediaSessionRepresentable protocol. It also supports remote media sessions (for controlling external speakers/TVs) and Media Sharing Extensions for routing media to third-party devices.

Xcode 27 introduces an agentic localization workflow that lets you ask a coding agent to translate your entire app directly inside Xcode, leveraging String Catalog context — including where and how strings are used — to produce accurate, consistent translations across all languages.

iOS 27 expands the App Intents framework with RelevantEntities for contextual content surfacing, EntityCollection for high-performance batch parameter handling, SyncableEntity for cross-device Siri continuity, native Duration/PersonNameComponents parameter types, and @UnionValue for multi-type parameters — plus extended intent execution time limits.

macOS 27 expands the Virtualization framework with automated macOS guest provisioning, USB accessory passthrough via the new Accessory Access framework, advanced vmnet network topologies, and efficient disk image management via the new DiskImageKit framework.

Container machines are a new feature of the open-source Containerization framework and container CLI tool that provides a persistent, lightweight Linux environment running in its own VM on macOS, with automatic user mapping, shared filesystem, and seamless macOS integration. Unlike ephemeral containers, a container machine retains state between sessions and feels like a native extension of the Mac.

The Spatial Preview framework lets macOS apps share and synchronize 2D and 3D content to Apple Vision Pro in real time, enabling users to view spatial photos, immersive video, PDFs, and USD scenes at full scale using Mac Virtual Display or a device picker.

iOS 27 / macOS 27 significantly expands declarative device management with new status items (device system health, Lockdown Mode, enrollment type), consolidated privacy consent prompts, managed migration for new Macs, enhanced log collection commands, and declarative app configuration support on macOS. These changes make declarative management the definitive standard for enterprise and education device fleets.

iOS 27 adds language-aware delivery to Managed Background Assets, allowing the system to download only the asset packs that match a player's preferred language setting. This reduces on-device storage and download size for games with multilingual content.

gRPC Swift provides a first-class Swift integration for building remote-procedure-call clients and services, with a new Xcode build plugin that automatically generates type-safe Swift code from .proto service definitions. It supports unary, client-streaming, server-streaming, and bidirectional-streaming RPCs.

iOS 27 extends fast capture prioritization on iPhone 16 and 17 to apply deferred processing to balanced-quality captures taken in quick succession, dramatically reducing shot-to-shot delay while still delivering high-quality results. Combined with 24/48MP support on the telephoto and ultrawide cameras, this release brings significant capture pipeline improvements.

iOS 27 brings persistent Storage to Shortcuts (letting values sync across devices between runs), three new automation triggers (screenshot, keyboard, notification), and an improved Use Model action with transcript inspection for debugging LLM-driven shortcut steps.

The iPhone 17, iPhone Air, and iPhone 17 Pro feature a square-sensor ultra-wide front camera with a 95° field of view. iOS 26 exposes new APIs — dynamic aspect ratio and a smart framing monitor — so apps can deliver auto-zoom, auto-rotate, and Center Stage tracking for selfies, recordings, and video calls.

iOS 27 integrates heart rate and cycling power zone tracking directly into HealthKit, automatically calculating time spent in each intensity zone during workouts and delivering live zone-change updates to your app.

iOS 27 introduces Bluetooth Channel Sounding support via Core Bluetooth and Nearby Interaction, enabling apps to measure real distance (and optionally direction) to paired Bluetooth accessories without requiring Ultra Wideband hardware.

AppIntentsTesting is a brand-new integration testing framework that lets developers write XCUITest-based tests to execute App Intents on-device — covering intents, entity queries, and entity chaining — without importing app code or using mocks.

The FoveatedStreaming framework lets visionOS apps connect to an external PC or cloud endpoint to stream OpenXR content directly to Apple Vision Pro, using eye-tracking-based foveated video compression and the built-in NVIDIA CloudXR runtime for low-latency wireless delivery.

MusicKit provides Swift-native APIs to browse the Apple Music catalog and personal library via a unified music picker, and play selected songs using ApplicationMusicPlayer. iOS 27 surfaces these capabilities through new SwiftUI view modifiers like .musicPicker and the subscription offer UI.

Device Hub is a new standalone app shipping with Xcode 27 that serves as a unified hub for managing, controlling, and configuring both physical devices and simulators. It provides a live interactive screen view, device configuration panels, diagnostics collection, and app data container management — all without needing to open Xcode.

visionOS 27 expands ARKit object tracking with high-frame-rate tracking, metric-space pose queries, extended Create ML training, spatial accessory support, and brings object tracking to iOS for the first time.

iOS 27 introduces the Poster Generic pass style for bold, image-forward loyalty and membership cards, four new barcode formats (EAN-13, Code 39, Codabar, ITF), and a new featuredActions API that surfaces contextual actions below any pass style. A new Pass Designer Mac app and Pass Builder Swift package streamline template creation and server-side pass signing.

Swift 6.3 and 6.4 introduce a range of language and library improvements including anyAppleOS availability syntax, module selectors for disambiguation, task cancellation shielding, improved Swift Testing interoperability with XCTest, and a new Foundation ProgressManager type.

Xcode 27 introduces enhanced test framework interoperability modes (Limited, Complete, Strict) that control how cross-framework issues are reported when mixing XCTest and Swift Testing in the same target, making it safer and more structured to incrementally migrate from XCTest to Swift Testing.

iOS 27 introduces APIs and standards for building live production tools for Apple Immersive Video, enabling developers to capture, transport, record, and play back 3D immersive video using ProRes over SMPTE 2110 with spatial audio and per-frame metadata. The format combines ProRes-encoded stereo video (2110-22), ASAF spatial audio (2110-30), and JSON metadata (2110-41) into a unified production pipeline.