Featured by the App Store on iOS 27 day

Where it is

iOS 27 went public at six in the evening, London time. At eight the App Store's own launch editorial went live, and Must Read was in it. Open the Today tab on an iPhone and it is there, in these stories and collections:

• See what’s new in iOS 27, the launch story itself, in its Visual Intelligence section
• See what’s new in iPadOS 27, the same on iPad
• Intelligence you can see, a Today story about Visual Intelligence, with the Must Read icon in its artwork, #4 in the UK and #7 in the US
• Level up your apps with Apple Intelligence, a Today story, in its list of apps built on Apple’s Foundation Models
• The next generation of Apple Intelligence, a Today story
• Refine your Liquid Glass settings, a Today story
• Great Apps Updated for iOS 27, the collection on the Apps tab
• Great Apps Updated for iPadOS 27, the same collection on iPad

What the editors saw

Must Read 3.6 was built for iOS 27 and released four days before it. Ask Rufus picks your next six books from the ones you have already read, on your phone, for every reader in all 32 languages, and on iOS 27 Apple Intelligence writes the reason under each pick through Private Cloud Compute. Siri answers “what am I reading” with the covers. Visual Intelligence opens a book from its cover. Your library shows up in Spotlight, there is a new extra-large widget for the Home Screen, and the app fits any window on iPad and in iPhone Mirroring on the Mac.

Every one of those is an iOS 27 technology used the way Apple designed it, and every one works on the day iOS 27 came out. That is what the stories are about.

How it got there

In July, at Apple's developer workshops in London, I said Must Read would be ready for iOS 27 on day one. Apple's Worldwide Developer Relations team in London spent real time with an app made by one person, and most of what shipped in 3.6 was worked out at those tables. Thank you to all of them.

The rest was the summer: Xcode 27 from the first beta, a recommendation engine that runs on the phone so that the AI only has to write, and a release submitted on 10 September and approved the same afternoon.

Must Read has been on the App Store since 2016. This is the first time it has been in Apple's stories, and it went in next to apps I have used for years. I'm going to need a minute.

The whole map

Two days on I read the App Store's own pages for every one of its 175 storefronts, iPhone and iPad, and kept the record. Must Read is in eight of the launch pages, not seven: the launch story itself, See what's new in iOS 27, lists it in its Visual Intelligence section. Across the storefronts that makes 1,518 placements, 860 of them inside a top 10, and every storefront has at least two. Intelligence you can see carries it on all 174 storefronts that have the story, #4 in the UK, #7 in the US, #1 in the United Arab Emirates on iPad.

Apple edits each story by region, so the list differs by country: the US and the EU on iPhone got their own edition of Level up your apps with Apple Intelligence without Must Read, and the same EU story on iPad puts it fifth. Apple's own numbers say what it was worth, and they are available to anyone writing about it. India was the biggest storefront on day two, ahead of the UK, Turkey and Japan. The positions for the UK and the US are on the press page.