iOS 27 introduces GenerateIterativeSegmentationRequest in the Vision framework, letting users interactively isolate any object in an image by providing a point, bounding box, lasso, or scribble as a seed, then iteratively refine the resulting mask.
• Enables Photoshop-style object isolation with a single tap — no ML model training required by the developer
• Supports iterative refinement (add/remove regions) making it suitable for polished photo editing and object extraction workflows
• Pairs naturally with Foundation Models image inputs and Vision tools for richer, multi-step image understanding pipelines
Foundation Models is a new Apple framework introduced in iOS 27 that gives developers on-device access to the same Apple Intelligence language model powering system features, enabling text generation, structured output, and tool-calling entirely on-device without a network connection.
Visual Intelligence brings iOS 17's Visual Look Up capabilities to a new developer-facing API surface in iOS 27, letting apps pipe live camera frames or static images through on-device scene understanding to extract subjects, text, barcodes, and rich semantic labels without any cloud round-trip.
iOS 27 opens the Foundation Models framework to third-party LLM providers via a new public LanguageModel protocol, enabling anyone to integrate custom, server-based, or open-source models using the same Swift API as Apple's on-device system model.
In-depth guide
iOS 27 On-Device AI & Apple Intelligence →App Schemas let developers describe their app's content and actions using pre-defined domain schemas (like the Calendar domain) so Siri can understand, search, and act on app data without custom NLP. Entities conforming to IndexedEntity are donated to Spotlight's semantic index, enabling natural-language queries over app content.