Some upcoming iPhone features were kept secret at WWDC, report claims

Macworld

When it comes to announcements, Apple takes a feast-or-famine approach. Most of the time the company guards its product roadmap secrets jealously, but when event time arrives it jumps on stage and fire-hoses knowledge into journalists’ faces. Until this month.

According to a new report, however, Apple was not wholly forthcoming at WWDC 2025. In the latest edition of his Power On newsletter, Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman says he knows of at least two significant iOS features that could and ordinarily would have been talked about on 9 June but which were kept secret, and hints that there may have been considerably more.

Both unannounced features were leaked by pundits, including Gurman, ahead of the event. The first was real-time AirPods translation, a rumor that caused huge interest when the story broke in March. Apple essentially announced this feature at WWDC25, but only for the iPhone (across multiple apps) and the Apple Watch (in Messages). The second, Gurman reports, ia “the ability to sync your wireless network login information at a hotel or gym across devices,” a more technical but equally useful capability.

It’s odd that neither of these would make the cut for the keynote presentation when several more minor updates were discussed (and many minutes were set aside for a comic song about app reviews). But Gurman says a conscious decision was made at a managerial level to avoid discussion of any features that might not be ready for launch either.

“The company didn’t want to risk repeating WWDC 2024,” he explains, “where it announced several features–including some tentpole technology–that were ultimately delayed by months or have yet to arrive.” This mainly refers to context-sensitive Siri, which appeared in iPhone 16 advertisements but still hasn’t launched—and doesn’t seem likely to appear until after the launch of the iPhone 17.

Given that this was a blanket policy, it seems unlikely that only these two features were left out for this reason. Who knows what else is hidden in the early iOS 26 betas, or will be added later in the testing process or in a 26.1 or 26.2 update? It makes a change for Apple to be so coy about a software update that it’s already announced, but may make for an interesting cycle of surprises and unexpected discoveries.