iOS 27 brings two fixes iPhone owners have grumbled about, starting with your AirPods

So where is the AirPods app?

Here is the weird part though, there is still no dedicated AirPods app this year. The Apple Watch has one and so does the Vision Pro, which leaves the best-selling earbuds on the planet as the odd one out.

The image tools Apple keeps quietly fixing

The second iOS 27 reveal is about Genmoji and Image Playground, Apple’s tools for spinning up custom emoji and AI images. Gurman reports that Apple has improved its own underlying models, so the actual quality of what you generate is getting a real bump this year.
This is the third piece of the same puzzle. We already covered the incoming Genmoji suggestions feature aimed at casual users, and Gurman previously reported that Image Playground would open up to third-party AI models beyond ChatGPT.So now you get smarter suggestions, outside models, and better Apple models all landing together. After an Apple Intelligence rollout that launched broken and limped its way to usable, this looks like Apple finally getting serious.

What I make of all this

The AirPods news is a classic Apple half-measure. Cleaning up the menu is genuinely useful, but refusing to ship an app for a product this capable feels less like restraint and more like stubbornness.

The image-tool story is the more interesting one to me. Apple spent over a year shipping AI features that embarrassed it, so quietly rebuilding the engine instead of hyping a flashy new logo is exactly the discipline it needed.