iOS 27's new AI editing tools finally catch the iPhone up to Google's Pixel phones, and they put a small choice in front of every user about what a phone photo is supposed to be.
The most popular camera in the world just learned to edit what it sees. Apple shipped the first serious set of AI photo editing tools in the iOS 27 developer beta at WWDC this week, and the tools are not subtle. They erase bystanders, paint in missing edges, and recompose a scene long after the shutter has closed. Every tap is a small choice about what the photo is supposed to be.
Reviewer Allison Johnson at The Verge spent time with the new features in Apple's Photos app and called the moment a tipping point for what a phone will let a user do to an image, including the auto-curated Memories reels that mix a user's library with stock footage. The honest read of the new kit is that it finally puts the iPhone close to where Google's Pixel line has been for years with its Magic Editor, and that the smaller story inside that catch-up is the deeper one.
Start with the simplest of the three. Clean Up is Apple's bystander eraser. The first version ran entirely on the device and was widely seen as a step backward, both because it left smudges where heads used to be and because Apple's on-device models were years behind Google's. The new version, in Johnson's hands-on test, leans on Apple's servers for the harder parts of the erase, which is a meaningful shift from the original on-device approach and a quiet admission that doing this work on the device alone was not good enough. It is also the moment a private photo leaves the phone for a second, which is the trade-off the new capability rests on.
Extend, Apple's outpainting tool, is the second of the three. It fills in missing edges when a user crops too tightly or wants to square up a frame. The behavior is familiar to anyone who has used similar tools from Adobe or Google, and the relevant change is that Apple is now putting this inside the stock Photos app rather than leaving it to third-party editors.
Spatial Reframing is the most ambitious of the three, and the most philosophically loaded. It lets a user recompose a scene after the fact, as if they had moved a few steps to the left before pressing the shutter. Johnson flagged the tool as both ambitious and problematic, because the new framing is not the framing the user originally chose. It is a re-imagining of the original moment, since the recomposed frame shows parts of the scene that were never visible in the original shot. In Johnson's hands-on, the results are not always clean, with visible seams in some cases. In principle it is the most consequential of the three, because it changes the contract between a camera and a moment.
A real limitation is worth naming. All of this sits inside a developer beta, and the final feature list and behavior can change before the public release ships to every iPhone in the fall. Reviewer verdicts on a beta are not the same as reviewer verdicts on a shipping product, and the comparative strength claims against Pixel's Magic Editor are the reviewer's framing rather than an independent benchmark. Apple has a history of late-stage surprises in both directions, so any "shipping now" claim should be hedged accordingly.
Strip the marketing away and the question the source actually raises is the one a reader is more likely to carry past the tab. A phone photo used to be a record of a moment a person was in. Now it is also a draft, something a person can rewrite, expand, or quietly reshoot after the fact. The new tools in iOS 27 do not force anyone to do that. They just make it a single tap away, on a device that lives in nearly every pocket in the country. What someone chooses to do with that is the part no review can answer for them.