CUPERTINO, California — The moment the check arrives at the table, something shifts. Someone reaches for their phone. Someone else starts doing the math out loud. The negotiation over who ordered what, whether to split the appetizer, and how to handle the tip is about to become someone else’s problem entirely — Apple’s, to be precise.
According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who cited people familiar with Apple’s plans, iOS 27 will include a new bill-splitting feature built into the Wallet and Messages apps. A user who paid the full tab at a restaurant or any shared event can photograph the receipt, assign individual line items to specific people in their group, and let the iPhone calculate each person’s share — food, tax, and tip included — before automatically generating Apple Cash payment requests. The feature is expected to be announced at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, which opens June 8.
The practical ambition is narrow but well-aimed. Splitting bills has always been the unglamorous edge case that neither Apple Pay nor Apple Cash ever fully solved. Apple Cash, the peer-to-peer payment system built into the Wallet app, already allows iPhone users to send money to each other as simply as sending a text. What it lacked was the intelligence to parse who owes what from a physical receipt — the step that invariably produces an awkward group silence. iOS 27 is designed to close that gap entirely, without requiring a third-party app.
The competitive target is obvious. Splitwise, the widely used expense-splitting app, and peer-to-peer services like Venmo and Cash App have built substantial user bases around exactly this need. Apple’s entry into the space doesn’t invent the category — it absorbs it, placing receipt-parsing and payment requests inside the operating system rather than asking users to download something separately. That displacement strategy has defined Apple’s financial services expansion since the introduction of Apple Pay in 2014: identify a friction point, build a native solution, and then wait for the ecosystem to follow. The same logic produced Apple Card and a high-yield savings account embedded in Wallet.
The bill-splitting feature will live in both the Wallet app and in Messages, according to Gurman. Recipients of a payment request will also have the option to approve the charge directly from an Apple Watch, adding a wrist-level convenience that third-party apps cannot replicate natively. That detail matters less for the feature’s core utility than for what it signals: Apple intends this to work within its existing hardware ecosystem rather than as an isolated software update.
The broader iOS 27 update, expected to be fully unveiled Monday at WWDC, contains a second major Wallet enhancement as well. A feature called “Create a Pass” will allow users to generate digital Wallet passes from physical items — gym membership cards, concert tickets, movie stubs — that lack native app support for Wallet integration. The pass-generation tool extends Apple’s long-running effort to position Wallet as a universal container for identity documents, transit cards, and event credentials.
Together, the two additions trace a clear line: Wallet is no longer primarily a place to store a credit card. It is becoming Apple’s default financial operating layer for day-to-day transactions, both digital and physical. Whether that layer is wide enough to displace the services people already use remains the open question. Splitwise retains cross-platform reach that Apple Cash cannot match — Android users in a dinner group cannot receive an Apple Cash request. That limitation is not a minor footnote. Gurman noted that Apple Cash is currently available only in the United States, which means the bill-splitting feature will launch with a significant geographic ceiling.
Still, within those boundaries — iPhone users, in the United States, paying each other — the feature addresses a real and frequently encountered friction point. The mechanics that Venmo built a company around are being quietly folded into the operating system itself. Apple Wallet has been expanding steadily in recent months, adding transit card support for the MARTA system in Atlanta and reaching fourteen U.S. states with digital driver’s licenses. The bill-splitting integration is the most behaviorally significant addition yet, because it targets a social ritual rather than a logistical one.
What Gurman’s report did not clarify is how the receipt-scanning step works in practice. Receipts are notoriously inconsistent: handwritten checks at neighborhood restaurants, thermal printouts that fade unevenly, itemized formats that vary between point-of-sale systems. Whether Apple’s image-recognition layer can parse that variety reliably at launch — or whether the feature will perform well in controlled conditions and frustrate users in the messier real world — is the kind of thing no pre-release report can answer.
The first developer beta of iOS 27 is expected to be released immediately following Monday’s WWDC keynote. Apple’s financial services strategy, of which Apple Cash is now a central pillar, has faced its own pressures this year, but the company is pressing forward with the bet that a deeply integrated financial layer — one that lives where the camera, the messages, and the watch already are — is a stronger proposition than any standalone app.
A public beta of iOS 27 is expected in July. The full release is scheduled for this fall, most likely September.
