WWDC announcements bring App Intents, Safari Notify Me, and more to iOS 27

TL;DR

Apple’s WWDC 2026 introduces advanced iOS 27 capabilities, including enhanced Apple Intelligence App Intents and real-time Live Activities. Braze encourages brands to capitalize on these updates by exploring the new capabilities early and assessing how they could potentially impact their customer engagement efforts.

Key takeaways

• App Intents allows users to take action with third-party apps directly through Siri or Spotlight on iOS 27, rather than requiring them to open the app
• Safari's new Notify Me feature lets users set plain-language alerts directly from any webpage, raising the risk that consumers will set price-drop and other alerts without directly engaging with brands’ customer engagement programs
• Siri can now read and interpret what's happening on a user's screen in real time, across third-party apps
• Apple's Retention Messaging API, surfaced through App Store Connect, gives developers an automated window to intercept a cancellation before it's final

Apple's WWDC never fails to give customer engagement teams something to act on.

Last year's announcements made clear that Apple was positioning iOS as an active, intelligent participant in curating user experiences, a shift that had real implications for how brands reach their audiences. This year, Apple is going further still, moving beyond curation and into the way users fundamentally interact with apps themselves. Each of this year's announcements takes a different piece of the traditional mobile engagement playbook (app opens, opt-in lists, session time) and rewrites the rules.

Here's our roundup of the top announcements that should be on customer engagement teams’ radar before the September release of iOS 27.

1. App Intents: The best experience might not be in the app

For years, mobile engagement has been built around a single goal: Get the user to open the app. App Intents fundamentally challenge that model. Instead of iPhone users needing to open an app to take an action, they can now act through Siri. A user can say, "Siri, reorder my usual large pepperoni from Pizza House," and the action completes in the background without the user ever touching the app. It's a meaningfully different experience—faster, lower effort, and increasingly what users will come to expect as App Intents become more common across iOS.

That last point is worth sitting with. Building App Intents is optional, but the competitive implications of not doing so are real. If a user can reorder from a competitor with a single voice command but has to open your app, navigate to their order history, and tap through three screens to do the same thing, that friction adds up. Developers can expose specific app actions, such as reordering a product, checking a loyalty balance, or booking an appointment, directly to these system-wide surfaces, and the brands that move early will have a head start on shaping how users build these new habits.

What this means for customer engagement: App Intents represent a fundamental change in how users get value from your app, and that means rethinking how you measure engagement. Session length and direct opens will matter less if users are completing high-value actions through Siri or Spotlight instead. The more useful question is: What outcomes actually matter for your business? If App Intents can drive purchases, bookings, loyalty redemptions, that's where your engineering team should focus when building them out. Provided developers instrument their App Intent handlers with Braze SDK calls, those completed actions can generate rich behavioral events that flow into Braze, fueling smarter segmentation and follow-up messaging. Even as the entry point shifts, your ability to understand and act on customer behavior can remain intact.

2. Safari "Notify Me": Rethinking the value of subscribing

Safari's new Notify Me feature lets users set plain-language alerts directly from any webpage: think "Notify me when this jacket drops below $100" or "Alert me when this sneaker restocks in a size 10." Safari monitors the page natively and sends a notification when the criteria are met, with no app download or email sign-up required.

What this means for customer engagement: For e-commerce and retail brands, this is one of the more disruptive announcements from this year's WWDC. Price drop and restock alerts have historically been a reliable driver of email and push opt-ins, and Safari's Notify Me gives users a way to get that same value without ever entering your CRM. The stronger play is to double down on what proprietary channels do better than a system-level notification: Personalization, relationship-building, and cross-sell opportunities. A Safari notification can tell someone a price dropped, but only your brand can follow up with, "You've been watching this for a while — here's 15% off, just for you" or suggest three similar items they might love even more. Revisit your push primer and opt-in messaging to make sure you're clearly articulating that more personalized experience, and on the tactical side, make sure your product pages are cleanly structured so that when a user sets a Notify Me alert, the right information is being tracked.

3. Siri AI: Understanding what's happening on screen

Siri can now read and interpret what's happening on a user's screen in real time, across third-party apps. If a user is browsing a hotel listing in your travel app and asks Siri to "book a flight to this place," Siri can extract the destination and dates from the screen and act on them automatically, without the user ever leaving the moment they're in.

What this means for customer engagement: This feature largely lives on the engineering side of the house, but marketers should be paying attention. Because users will need to enable Apple Intelligence to unlock on-screen awareness, adoption will be gradual. It's also worth noting that Apple Intelligence features, including on-screen awareness, are launching without EU or China support initially. That makes now a good time to get your app in order before it becomes widespread. For Siri's on-screen awareness to work seamlessly inside your app, your UI needs to follow native accessibility and structural frameworks closely; apps with non-standard elements or unlabeled graphics may be invisible to Siri's parser entirely. Brands that invest in accessibility and native UI standards won't just comply with guidelines: They'll gain a real competitive advantage as Apple continues to deepen Siri's contextual capabilities.

4. Retention Messaging API: A native second chance before the cancel

This one is for your subscription teams. Apple's Retention Messaging API, surfaced through App Store Connect, gives developers an automated window to intercept a cancellation before it's final. When a user taps "Cancel Subscription" in iOS settings, the App Store can pause the flow and display a custom message from the developer (a discounted offer, an alternate tier, or context about recent updates) before the cancellation completes. Developers can configure messages through App Store Connect, or use a real-time API that lets you respond dynamically with the right offer for each subscriber.

What this means for customer engagement: Historically, the iOS settings screen has been a black box where subscribers disappear. The Retention Messaging API changes that by creating a high-intent moment to speak directly to a disengaged user before they've fully made up their mind. Think of it as a native save flow that runs before the cancellation goes through: It complements your existing re-engagement campaigns rather than replacing them. Users who cancel anyway become strong candidates for a follow-up series via email or push, and the response data is a useful signal for improving long-term lifecycle segmentation.

5. Upgraded Native Wallet: The easiest loyalty sign-up yet

Apple is making it meaningfully easier for users to digitize physical loyalty cards, barcodes, and printed tickets. A customer can point their iPhone camera at any physical barcode or QR code, and iOS will automatically generate a native Apple Wallet pass with no app download or manual data entry required. Once a pass is in Wallet, it can surface contextual lock screen notifications based on location, such as when a customer is near a store.

What this means for customer engagement: For brands with loyalty programs or brick-and-mortar locations, this lowers the barrier to entry for shoppers who would never bother downloading an app or manually entering a member ID. Digitizing a loyalty card has always involved enough friction that many shoppers simply opt out, but with iOS 27, the camera does the work instead. This can result in a wider top of the funnel for your loyalty program, and more users in Wallet may mean more opportunities to reach customers at high-intent moments near your locations. Make sure your physical loyalty materials have clearly scannable barcodes or QR codes. If you're already connecting Wallet pass activity to your engagement stack, expect a meaningful increase in the addressable audience as more users add cards natively.

Final thoughts

WWDC 2026 made one thing very clear: The OS should work for the user first, and brands earn their place by being genuinely useful. From the way users discover and act on app features (App Intents), to how they track products without opting in (Safari Notify Me), to how brands can intercept churn (Retention Messaging), each of these updates reflects how Apple is actively reshaping the rules of mobile engagement around that philosophy.

Relevance is the price of admission, and Apple keeps raising it. The brands that come out ahead will be the ones who earned their place in the user's day with first-party data, thoughtful segmentation, and messaging that a system-level notification can't replicate, whether that moment is a Siri voice command, a lock screen prompt near a store, or a last-chance offer before a cancellation goes through.

As always, our teams at Braze will be testing these features and building support where relevant. Keep an eye on the Braze blog and our iOS Swift SDK changelog for updates as we get closer to the fall release.