iOS 27 makes older iPhones fast again
If you’ve installed iOS 26 on an older iPhone, you’ve probably noticed that some things weren’t exactly smooth. Even some of the latest iPhones had some trouble running the fancy animations added with Liquid Glass.
Also, I recently wrote about how iOS 26 seemed noticeably buggy compared to other recent iOS releases. Animations stuttered more often, apps took longer to launch, and even basic system interactions sometimes felt sluggish.
Apple promised that iOS 27 would address many of these issues. While we only have access to the first beta of iOS 27, my tests with the iPhone 11 Pro Max show that the company was serious about improving performance, especially when it comes to old hardware.
iOS 27 will bring some design refinements to Liquid Glass, but the real improvements are with performance.
Foundry
To get a better idea of how much has changed, I measured the time it takes to complete a handful of common tasks on the same iPhone 11 Pro Max running iOS 26 and iOS 27 beta 1.
I started with something simple that most people do every day: taking photos with their iPhone. On iOS 26, my iPhone 11 took 0.98 seconds to open the Camera app, then 3.61 seconds to take a photo and load it into my photo library.
I ran the test again with iOS 27, and the improvements were noticeable. Now it only takes about 0.65 seconds to open the Camera app, and 2.44 seconds to take a photo and immediately open it from the thumbnail preview. For users, this means a lower chance of missing an important shot because their phone is too slow.
