Apple Will Make Joining Public Wi-Fi Networks Easier in iOS 26
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Frequent travellers who juggle multiple Apple devices across hotels and airports will appreciate a new feature in iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 that will make it far easier to keep everything connected on the go.
Last month, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that Apple was working on a feature to sync captive Wi-Fi credentials across multiple devices, allowing users to more seamlessly get their devices connected to Wi-FI in hotels, airports, coffee shops, and other places that present an in-browser sign-on page before allowing access to the internet.
While Apple has long synced standard Wi-Fi passwords across devices, captive networks present an additional obstacle: even though the Wi-Fi network is synced, you still need to go through a portal page on each of your devices before you can get online. If you want to use your iPhone, iPad, and Mac in your hotel room, you’ll need to go through the captive portal for each device, and you may have to do this once or twice a day during an extended stay, as the sessions typically expire after a few hours.
At the time, Gurman predicted the feature would be coming in “iOS 19,” but that was before the big reveal that Apple would be turning the dial to 26 this year. However, when Apple unveiled its new operating systems during its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), there wasn’t even a passing mention of it, nor did it appear on the slide showing a roundup of 36 additional features — a slide that included other unspoken gems like customizable snooze timers, adaptive power, and auto-sleeping AirPods.
This led some to believe that the feature wasn’t ready yet. As Gurman recently pointed out in his Power On newsletter, Apple has been more cautious about announcing features that won’t be ready before iOS 26.0 or iOS 26.1 after it got everyone’s hopes up with a longer-term promise of Siri features that didn’t materialize. Gurman said that he still expects “the ability to sync your wireless network login information at a hotel or gym across devices” to come at some point this year, as hints of the feature have already been found in the iOS 26 beta code.
The good news is that it seems we won’t have to wait. It’s unclear if this feature was up and running in the first developer beta, but analyst Max Weinbach stumbled onto it not long after installing the second developer beta.
While inarguably useful, the new feature isn’t quite as transparent as we’d hoped. You’ll need to sign into the captive Wi-Fi network on at least one device, which is perfectly understandable; however, it doesn’t appear that your other devices will be signed into the captive Wi-Fi network automatically.
Based on Weinbach’s post, this feature essentially merely offers to autofill whatever information the captive Wi-Fi portal requires. That still saves time and frustration, especially for those portals that require specific information, such as a room number, guest name, or other access code, but it won’t save much time for those that merely need you to check a consent box.
With the wide variety of captive portals, it may be too challenging for Apple to do this seamlessly. Then again, we’re also only on the second beta, and we’re dealing with one anecdotal account of the feature. Apple may be able to do more with specific types of captive portals that offer more standards-based authentication methods. The feature still appears to be hit-or-miss in these early developer betas, so it’s too early to say what the final implementation will look like.
