Glow Leopard
Apple at WWDC 2026 today said it has made several responsiveness improvements across its software ecosystem, speeding up system animations, app launching, and much more.
Overall, iOS 27 so far is a major collection of performance improvements and refinements.
As had been rumored leading up to today, Apple has spent extra time this year working on bug fixes and performance improvements for iOS 27.
Although there’s no obvious connection between the Tahoe and Golden Gate names to indicate a “tock” release, Apple devoted the first chunk of the WWDC keynote to how OS 27 will address user and developer complaints about OS 26.
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Apple also made a big deal about performance improvements, smoothing system animations, launching iPhone and iPad apps up to 30% faster, displaying new photos in the Photo Library up to 70% faster, transferring files via AirDrop up to 80% faster, and moving files from an iPad to an external drive is up to 5x faster, so it compares with macOS transfer speeds. A new CPU Scheduler promises to improve iPhone performance even on older models back to the iPhone 11, which may encourage more people with older iPhones to upgrade.
There really aren’t many changes this year.
I’m way more interested in bug fixes, but optimizations and refinements are great, too. Simply limiting the number of new features creates space to improve the software quality, though, it’s not clear to me whether there are really fewer new features or if it’s just that they mostly fall under the single heading of AI.
Animations run smoother, apps launch faster, and Liquid Glass is better? It’s Glow Leopard for sure!
One underrated theme from this WWDC is Apple investing heavily in fundamentals.
Faster launches, scheduler improvements, search infrastructure, networking transitions, rendering performance…
Users notice responsiveness long before they notice most new features.
You gotta admire Apple’s ability to market “bug fixes and performance improvements” so effectively.
Please just do this every other year.
Previously:
- Golden Gate Menu Icons
- Golden Gate Sidebars and Toolbars
- Golden Gate Window Corners
- Liquid Glass 27 Slider
- Liquid Glass 27 Icons
- macOS Golden Gate 27 Announced
- iOS 27 Announced
- iPadOS 27 Announced
- WWDC 2026 Keynote
- WWDC 2026 Wish Lists
- 2025 Six Colors Apple Report Card
- iOS 27 “Rave” Update to Clean Up Code
- What Happened to Apple’s Legendary Attention to Detail?
- The Tim Cook Era
- Apple Needs a Snow Sequoia
Update (2026-06-12): David Smith:
Something I’ve noticed about performance work is that people really want there to be A Cause for improvements. A new technology, something old no longer holding things back, “removing the debug logging”, etc…
The truth of the matter is that 97% of the time the enabling thing for performance work is engineers having time in the schedule to sit down with the tools (usually a sampling profiler) and grind out small wins over and over.
There’s no magic bullet that replaces good engineering.
It sounds like the magic bullet is a reasonable release schedule. You’ve always had the power, my dear Craig. You just had to learn it for yourself.
The moment the keynote used the phrases “sweating the details” and “attention to detail,” it was clear that beyond AI and Siri features, this year is about small fixes and improvements. In more private settings, Apple folks specifically referenced Snow Leopard and iOS 12, two updates that saw Apple take a pause from huge feature roll-outs and prioritize speed and bug fixes a bit more.
But to be clear, referencing Snow Leopard does not mean “no new features.” Like Apple’s 27 releases, Snow Leopard was full of dozens, if not hundreds, of new features—they were just scattered small improvements throughout the system.
The older I get and the longer I do this development work I realize time is short and we may not get to all the things we want to do in life. So when we are forced to wait yet another year for some fixes to a framework we’ve been trying to use for several yearly cycles already it can be disappointing to say the least.
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Unlike past years there is no clear Apple mandated work. Thank god. I can focus on what I want to build without having to adopt my code to an ill conceived UI update that will be semi-discarded the following year.
Update (2026-06-16): Marcin Wichary:
It’s an impressive list that garnered universally positive reactions, but I have one observation:
- “Fast” and variants thereof appear on this list 59 times.
- “Reliable” and similar words appear 22 times.
[…]
It’s not just me. 15 out of 17 bugs listed on the Bugs Apple Loves site are about reliability.
[…]
I just… I would be a lot more excited if the 3:1 ratio of fast-to-reliable on that slide went the other way.
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What I want to know is: did anyone actually test the betas to validate these claims, or is this just all hype created by Apple? I guess it's only been one day, but it would be nice if people weren't stenographers for Apple. I'm assuming this is all hype until I see some actual hands-on experience. Maybe I can just skip the '26 OSes entirely.
They could have named it iOS/macOS/tvOS etc. 26.7 and call it a day. It has all the features that were announced for iOS/macOS etc. 26, just… working :->
Just say we’re skipping iOS/macOS 27. Which brings me back to the new naming scheme announced with 26. I think it was a mistake. It sorts of forces Apple to send out a new major release every year, even if the new version is not ready for public consumption. They are creating a self-imposed impossible timeline to follow.
It's funny how they are marketing this as optimizations, when all they really did was reduce the timing of superfluous animations. I've had all that crap turned off since the day "Reduce Motion" became an option. Share sheets are still super slow though. Hope they fixed that. I don't understand the point of any animation. The phone should wait for my input -- I should NEVER have to wait for a modern OS to catch up with me (especially considering that modern CPUs are what we would have called supercomputers 20 years ago).
Marketing toolbars in 2026 sure is something. As is me being exciting to see toolbars again. Bar is low and they stepped over it, good job Apple.
I wonder how performance compares to the versions released before 2025. Tahoe & iOS 26 were such a performance regression, I'm wondering if these just look good because it was so much slower
according to this early anecdotal vid from someone who installed the beta https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwnKcG_TVPw , launch time improvements weren't notice-able when launching Affinity. And 'smoother animations' so far seems to translate to slower animations with more frames, particularly on high frame rate screens. Hope there's real improvements to be found :(
@Ben Is it actually faster with Reduce Motion? I thought the timing was the same, and it just didn’t animate.
Many of the optimizations do sound real, though.
@piri
For the past year or so, I have noticed Affinity having weirdly long and inconsistent launch times, so that particular app may not be the best indicator of any performance improvements.
Also, I noticed in the fine print that 'faster app launches' were for most OSes except macOS — not sure if that was just a marketing copy oversight or if the app launch process on Mac didn't get the same attention this year.
Naming a release after the main year it will be new is not necessarily locking them in to an annual release cycle. Just ask some versions of Windows and Office.
And the problem with Mac launches seems to be all the network connected security checks which they are clearly not backing down on.
And the OCSPocalypse went down the memory hole along with WWDC 24.
