Tech Trends: iOS 27 May Auto-Delete Drama and Introduce Genmoji

As we get closer to next month’s iOS 27 debut, the beginning of a new week brings yet another report on some additional features we can expect from Apple’s next major iPhone software update.

For the last few months, the focus among leakers and analysts has been on Apple’s long-awaited Siri improvements. By all accounts, iOS 27 will be the release that finally delivers on what Apple showed off at its 2024 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) — and then some.

To recap, WWDC 2024 featured the debut of Apple Intelligence, with Writing Tools, Image Playground, ChatGPT integration into Siri, and the promise of a more advanced Siri that would be able to understand personal context and be able to act more like a human assistant, piecing together details from various apps on your iPhone such as Mail, Messages, and Calendar to provide relevant answers to straightforward queries like “What time does my mom’s flight land?”

While Apple’s new AI features didn’t arrive in iOS 18.0 that fall, the company did manage to deliver on nearly all of them throughout the iOS 18 lifecycle — all except for the new and improved Siri, that is.

Around the time that iOS 18.4 rolled around in early 2025, Apple announced that “Siri 2.0” would not be coming until “the coming year.” Many assumed this meant the next major software update — what became iOS 26 after Apple switched to year-based numbering — and it looks like Apple was aiming for iOS 26.4, but didn’t quite make it, despite a new partnership with Google to help build its foundation models.

Still, that deal has put Apple much further ahead than it was last year, when Apple had to restructure its entire Siri organization to get things back on track. At this stage, the reports suggest that it’s more a question of fine-tuning the AI models.

It’s also not entirely clear if Apple truly planned to push something out in iOS 26. In light of the much bigger plans it reportedly has in store for iOS 27, it would make sense for the company to unveil everything in one fell swoop rather than trickling it out in pieces.

From everything we’ve heard so far, there’s already quite a list of things that will take Siri beyond Apple’s initial promise for it:

1. Siri is expected to become a full chatbot with a standalone app, akin to ChatGPT and Gemini. The app will reportedly resemble Messages and allow for all the things you’d expect from rival apps, including storing conversation history and allowing files and images to be uploaded for analysis.
2. Apple plans to let users replace or extend Siri with other AI models. This may be little more than adding Gemini and Claude to the mix alongside ChatGPT, but early reports suggest that they’ll be able to do a whole lot more than just back up Siri, and it might even be possible to call them up more seamlessly.
3. Siri will come to the Camera app in what looks like a major play to put visual intelligence front and center while also rebranding it under the Siri umbrella to make it feel more integrated into the user experience.
4. Siri will move into the Dynamic Island and system search so users can access it more easily and seamlessly pivot between voice and text-based interactions.

Even though Apple is partnering with Google to help build the new Siri, everything will still be powered by Apple’s own foundation models. Siri won’t be “powered by Gemini” in the most literal sense, but it will share some of the same DNA.

Now, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who has provided most of the insight on what to expect from Siri and iOS 27 over the past few weeks, is offering some new details. In this week’s Power On newsletter, Gurman explains how Apple plans to make Siri a much more “privacy-first” chatbot than any of its rivals, while also expecting the company is likely to hedge a bit by slapping a “beta” label on the new Siri — even after the public release.

According to Gurman, the new Siri app won’t just be borrowing its UI design from the Messages app. Apple also plans to bring the same message expiry features, letting users choose to purge conversations after the same pre-set intervals of 30 days or one year. This will help users ensure that older conversations are automatically wiped away after a certain time, although it will almost certainly be possible to remove chats manually as well.

However, this will likely differ a bit from Messages due to the contextual and training aspects of the AI chatbot. Gurman suggests that deleted chats — whether removed manually or automatically — won’t form part of Siri’s personalization or “memory” when responding to future requests.

Apple may choose to lean on this feature more than the temporary or incognito chat modes offered by its rivals due to its more foundational approach to privacy — the idea that such protections should be built-in defaults rather than optional settings that users have to think about.

Gurman also notes that users will be able to decide whether the Siri app opens to a list of prior conversations or a new chat at each launch. This is likely more about quick access for starting new chats, but it could also have a privacy benefit of ensuring that personal information isn’t readily visible to shoulder-surfers.

Genmoji Redux

While it’s not directly related to Siri, Apple also reportedly plans to beef up what’s become one of its more obscure Apple Intelligence features to try and get more folks to actually use it.