Apple iOS 27 leaks: Google Cast for EU, AirPods UI revamp, watchOS heart rate

UPDATED · News · 25 May 2026 · MTW Editorial Team

Apple iOS 27 leaks moved fast on 24 May 2026, with reports landing on the same Sunday for the AirPods settings revamp, the Google Cast streaming pickup, the watchOS 27 heart-rate upgrade and a major Image Playground polish. 9to5Mac and Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman filed three coordinated reports detailing the operating systems Apple will unveil at the WWDC 2026 keynote on 8 June 2026 in Cupertino, and the picture that emerges is a polish-heavy year with one structural concession to the EU Digital Markets Act.

Apple iOS 27 Google Cast support is the EU’s biggest concession yet

The most consequential iOS 27 leak is Apple opening AirPlay to third-party streaming protocols at the system level for EU users. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that iOS 27 will let users replace AirPlay with Google Cast and other protocols as the default casting option from system-level surfaces, in response to the European Union’s Digital Markets Act. This is exactly the kind of structural concession Apple has resisted for years, and it follows the EU forced changes to third-party app marketplaces and default browser selection that landed in iOS 17.4 and iOS 18.

Practical implications: EU iPhone owners with Chromecast-equipped TVs will be able to cast from Apple Music, Apple TV, Apple Podcasts and any first-party app to a Chromecast directly, without needing the Apple TV box or AirPlay-equipped speakers. Google Cast (formerly Chromecast) is the most installed third-party protocol on the planet, so the inclusion is the right call. The change is rumoured to be EU-only at launch, the same regional carve-out Apple has used for sideloading. US and UK iPhone owners will not get Google Cast in iOS 27 unless Apple decides to extend it later. Tie that to the wider Google AI Ultra UK rollout we covered last week.

Apple iOS 27 AirPods settings UI revamp

The iOS 27 AirPods settings revamp is the change every AirPods owner has been asking for since 2016. Apple has bolted feature after feature onto a settings panel that lives inside the Bluetooth menu, and the result is a long unreadable list of toggles for head gestures, hearing aid mode, sleep detection, conversation awareness, automatic switching, find-my proximity, and a dozen other features. iOS 27 reorganizes that list into functional groups, surfaces the most-used controls higher, and migrates accessibility-only options into a single visible section. The team behind the revamp also addresses the long-running complaint that AirPods firmware updates have no visible status, no progress bar and no completion notification.

What Apple still has not done is give AirPods their own companion app, the way Apple Watch and Vision Pro do. The 9to5Mac report is explicit that this is still inside Settings in iOS 27. Apple’s argument is that AirPods do not need an app because the settings touchpoints are infrequent. The user complaint that is louder than that argument is that no other premium audio brand makes its customers dig through Bluetooth submenus to access core functions. Sony, Bose, Sennheiser and Sonos all ship a dedicated app. Apple should ship one too; iOS 28 is the next opportunity. Pair the AirPods revamp with our recent AirPods Pro 3 vs AirPods 4 guide for the buyer’s view.

Apple iOS 27 Image Playground and Genmoji upgrades

The Image Playground and Genmoji models built into Apple Intelligence have been the weakest part of Apple’s on-device AI since launch in iOS 18.1. iOS 27 reportedly addresses that with a significant visual-quality bump to Apple’s own image models, which power both Genmoji creation in Messages and the standalone Image Playground app. The leak from Gurman confirms that the visual quality boost is delivered by an updated Apple-trained image model, not by a deeper integration with ChatGPT or Gemini. Independent users have been complaining for a year that the Apple Intelligence image quality lags Midjourney, Stable Diffusion 3 and Google Imagen 3; the iOS 27 update tries to close that gap.

Apple is also reportedly opening Image Playground to third-party AI models in iOS 27. Users will be able to swap the default Apple model for ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini at the image-generation step. Genmoji will get automatic suggestions based on photo library context and keyboard history, which is the most Apple-flavoured feature in the rumoured set. None of this is going to disrupt the dedicated AI image market, but it does close one of the most visible Apple Intelligence weaknesses, and it sets up a fairer comparison against the creative AI suites we covered earlier in the week.

Apple watchOS 27: heart-rate improvements, Mulberry delayed

watchOS 27 is the polish year. Gurman’s 24 May 2026 Power On newsletter said watchOS 27 will mostly deliver stability improvements, performance refinements, and a meaningful heart-rate accuracy upgrade tied to a new sensor calibration model. The internal Apple project that became known as Mulberry, an AI-driven health coach designed to surface personalized fitness guidance, has slipped past the launch window for iOS 27 and watchOS 27, although a partial rollout is possible later in the iOS 27 cycle. The Modular Ultra watch face will land on the regular Apple Watch Series 11 and Series 12 with watchOS 27, ending the Ultra-exclusive status it had since launch.

The Mulberry delay is the meaningful product story underneath. AI health coaching is genuinely hard to ship safely because the failure mode is medical, not cosmetic. Apple has been clear with regulators about the level of evidence it wants before recommending health actions, and Mulberry has not cleared that bar. Treat the watchOS 27 update as a refinement year, not a leap. If you are a current Apple Watch Series 10 or Series 11 owner, the upgrade is worth installing on day one for the heart-rate accuracy improvements alone, and the broader experience aligns with our Apple Watch Series 11 vs Galaxy Watch 8 head-to-head.

iOS 27 release timeline and supported devices

The supported device list for iOS 27 has not been formally confirmed, but Gurman reports Apple will drop iPhone 11, iPhone XR and iPhone XS support, keeping iPhone SE 3rd gen and iPhone 12 onwards in the compatibility list. That is the longest support window of any major mobile OS in the market and the single best reason to buy iPhone hardware over Android for buyers who keep phones five years or more.

What to expect at WWDC 2026 beyond iOS 27

WWDC 2026 also brings iPadOS 27, macOS 27, watchOS 27, tvOS 27, visionOS 27 and a new HomePod software release. The bigger narrative arc, which we covered in detail in our Apple Gen AI WWDC preview, is that Apple needs a credible response to Google I/O 2026 Gemini Spark and OpenAI’s GPT-5.2-Codex push. The iOS 27 model-swap feature is the structural concession that lets Apple Intelligence stay competitive by letting users plug in the best non-Apple model when Apple’s own falls short. That is the right strategic call.

What we should NOT expect at WWDC 2026: a new Siri rebuild. The Bloomberg reporting has been clear that the Siri overhaul Apple promised for 2025 has slipped and that 2027 is the earliest realistic target. Treat WWDC 2026 as the consolidation year, not the breakthrough. The 8 June 2026 keynote should be watched closely for any indication of Apple’s response to Claude lab profitability and to OpenAI’s enterprise growth, both of which threaten Apple’s premium AI positioning over the long term.

For UK readers

UK readers: Apple has not commented on the iOS 27 leaks at the time of writing. UK iPhone users on EE, VodafoneThree and Virgin Media O2 will get iOS 27 on the same day as the global release, expected at WWDC 2026 in early June. The Google Cast EU feature, if it ships, will apply to UK iPhones under retained EU competition rules (UK CMA confirmed in 2026 that EU Digital Markets Act remedies extend to the UK market). Watch Apple UK newsroom for confirmation.