New iOS 26 features: Apple might add two more ahead of launch

WWDC has come and gone with plenty of iOS 26 announcements, including Liquid Glass and plenty of other stuff enthusiasts are exploring in the beta release. It turns out that more may be in store for iOS 26 before its official release later this year, including two new features that Apple hasn’t announced yet. 

The news comes via Mark Gurman’s “Power On” newsletter. Bloomberg’s Apple guru told a reader that there were still two features that he expects to be included with iOS 26 that have yet to be announced. The first is the long-awaited live translation feature coming to AirPods and the other is a method to sync public Wi-Fi login information across the device. 

Of the two, the AirPods' upcoming translation feature is by far the more interesting. Based on reports, it’ll work by using an iPhone app. The phone will listen for the other speaker and then route the translation directly through the AirPods. When the user responds, the phone will listen, translate it back into the other language, and then play the translation out loud for the other person. 

Apple’s Translate app can already do this without the AirPods, allowing two people to talk into the iPhone and have the conversation translated for one another with everything played through the phone speaker. With the AirPods support, it’ll be similar to how Google’s Pixel Buds and Samsung’s Galaxy Buds 3 do it, which will put Apple on par with its biggest competitors. 

The other feature is a little less exciting but equally useful, especially for people who travel often. By syncing things like airport, hotel, or gym Wi-Fi login credentials across devices, you can log in with a MacBook, iPhone, or whatever else without needing to hunt down and input the login credentials for each device separately. 

Gurman didn’t mention when the new features would be announced. However, he did note that Apple had a focus on translation at WWDC and the existence of code bits that hint at the Wi-Fi sync feature. Gurman posits that Apple didn’t announce these new features in case they got delayed, like several features were after WWDC 2024, including Apple’s still-upcoming AI-powered Siri.