MacRumors reported that Apple said users will be able to switch between two iPhones using the same phone number in iOS 27, a setup that could matter for people who carry a spare device or move a number between phones. The feature was described as one of the smaller changes in the release, and it was not named.
The reason it is drawing attention now is simple: Apple’s WWDC keynote in June was centered on a redesigned Siri app and a wave of Apple Intelligence features, while this change was left off stage. In other words, the iPhone Handoff Feature surfaced later as part of the quieter work around iOS 27, not as one of the headline announcements from WWDC.
MacRumors compared the idea to how an iPhone and a cellular Apple Watch already share a number, saying the new setup could work similar to that arrangement. That comparison matters because it suggests Apple is not reinventing number sharing from scratch; it is extending a familiar model to a second phone. The report also said the public beta was planned for July, with general release expected this fall and full features arriving in September.
But the reporting left a key detail unresolved. It was not clear whether the capability was even functional in the developer beta at the time, which means the feature may have been announced in principle before it was fully usable in practice. The report also did not explain whether users would need to switch manually between the two iPhones or whether both could remain active at the same time under one number.
That gap is the part to watch next. If Apple is building this into iOS 27, the practical question is not whether the feature exists in a slide or a report, but how it will behave when a user tries to move a number from one iPhone to another during the beta cycle and beyond.
