What’s New in iOS 27 Beta 5

Zac Hall at 9to5Mac has a good rundown of new features and changes in beta 5. Some app icons got tweaks (the Siri app in particular looks much cooler now), and a bunch of the existing American and British Siri speaking voices now have the Pace and Expressivity adjustment sliders.

Also interesting: the OS 27 releases were stuck at beta 4 for 22 days. That’s a week longer than usual. Will Hains (my Kotoba friend) maintains a wonderful single-page website tracking iOS version release date history. For these summer “next big version” comparisons, it’s best to filter by “*.0” releases. Do that at Hains’s website and you can see a fairly clear pattern: betas 1 through 4 typically last about two weeks each; then starting with beta 5, Apple switches to a roughly weekly schedule until the end of the beta cycle. I wouldn’t read anything into that other than to expect beta 6 next week and beta 7 the week after that.

★ Monday, 10 August 2026