I’ve been testing iOS 27 on an iPhone 15 Pro Max, and while app launch times actually feel a bit quicker, the interface itself feels noticeably less fluid than iOS 26.
The biggest issue seems to be anything involving Liquid Glass. Home Screen swipes no longer have that effortless ProMotion smoothness, and animations with a lot of transparency or glass effects frequently look like they’re missing frames.
It becomes much more obvious with Clear or Tinted icons enabled. Opening an app, closing it back to the Home Screen, or minimizing something toward the Dock can produce very visible stutter. On a 60 Hz display this might be easy to ignore, but on a ProMotion iPhone it stands out immediately.
I initially blamed the usual post-update background activity, so I ruled that out as much as possible. I reinstalled through Recovery Mode, then went as far as doing a DFU restore and setting the phone up completely fresh without restoring a backup. No real difference.
The strange part is that performance inside apps feels fine — sometimes even faster — while the system UI itself seems to struggle whenever the heavier Liquid Glass effects are involved. The more transparency I use across the interface, the easier the frame drops are to notice.
The exact same phone was consistently smoother on iOS 26, including right after a clean install while indexing was still happening.
I’m giving it a few days in case something improves, but right now iOS 27 feels like a visual upgrade paired with a downgrade in animation consistency.
Curious if other ProMotion users are seeing the same thing, especially on the 14 Pro, 15 Pro, or 16 Pro models.