Apple Releases iPadOS 27 With Liquid Glass Refinements, Faster Performance, but China iPads Miss AI Features

In iPadOS 27, Liquid Glass changes are mostly adjustments rather than a major redesign. App sidebars return to an edge-to-edge layout similar to iPadOS 18 and consistent with macOS 27 Golden Gate, after the floating sidebar design in iPadOS 26. Built-in app icons have been rebuilt with more Liquid Glass elements, and third-party icons are rendered with a more dimensional look and sharper edges. Buttons, notifications, text fields and context menus use new lighting and shadow rendering, and content underneath them is less visibly refracted than in iPadOS 26, which the report said improves readability. A transparency slider in Settings and Appearance lets users adjust the Liquid Glass effect, with the most opaque setting producing a milky frosted-glass look similar to iPadOS 18.

The menu bar introduced in iPadOS 26 now shows the app name at the top of the screen by default, and tapping the name reveals menu options. This avoids accidental gestures from the previous swipe interaction, because the top-center pull-down gesture is now assigned to the new Siri AI. Users can also set the menu bar to remain visible. Apple removed most small SF Symbols icons from menu items, leaving mainly window controls, a change also seen in macOS 27. Home screen edits can now be undone and redone, while the extra-large widgets added in iOS can be placed only in the Today View on iPadOS, not directly on the home screen. iPhone app windows can be resized more freely when running iOS apps on iPadOS.

Sidecar in iPadOS 27 and macOS 27 supports touch input through the iPad screen, including scrolling and pinch-to-zoom multi-touch gestures, according to the report. Apple Pencil receives a new charging sound that resembles the iPad charging tone but differs slightly in timbre. Handwritten characters can now be indexed by Spotlight, allowing full-text searches of handwritten notes in the Notes app. The feature relies on Apple's PencilKit, so third-party apps built with PencilKit can also use handwriting recognition. Notes content can be copied as Markdown.

Performance improvements include faster animations and a smoother system, with better standby battery life on some iPads, the report said. AirDrop and AirPlay transfers are faster, as are copying and browsing files on an external SSD. In the report's test, copying 3.74 GB from a drive to an iPad mini's internal storage took about five seconds, while copying 21 GB from the iPad mini to an SSD took less than 30 seconds, close to saturating 10 Gbps bandwidth.

AI features on iPadOS 27 have been upgraded with help from Google Gemini, but Apple Intelligence and Siri AI-related functions remain unavailable on China-market iPads. The report said Apple Foundation Models now include assistance from Google Gemini, while Apple maintains that the new Foundation Models are still Apple-developed. Agentic capabilities and APIs that Apple has prepared since 2024 led to Siri AI, the report said. iPadOS Apple Intelligence features are similar to those on iOS, with system-level context and screen awareness that can interact with content on the screen in real time. Siri AI can be accessed by swiping down from the top of the main interface into the new Spotlight, or through a standalone Siri app for in-app conversations.

Shaoshupai described the overall direction of iPadOS 27 as Apple bringing macOS and iPadOS closer in system design, while continuing to polish Liquid Glass and improve performance, interaction and features.