A report over the weekend said that iOS 19 will have a small but useful new feature when using public Wi-Fi hotspots. According to Bloomberg, if we register with any of our Apple devices, then all our other ones will automatically log us in next time.
In other words, register for your coffee shop Wi-Fi with your iPhone and you’ll benefit from automatic login on your iPad or Mac on a subsequent visit. That’s great, but I’d love to see Apple go a step further …
Back in the very early days of public Wi-Fi hotspots, things were simple. You saw the SSID, connected to it, and were immediately online. Then along came one of the worst inventions in technology: the captive portal.
This is a splash screen which automatically pops up when you first connect to a new hotspot. It typically demands your email address and tries to trick you into signing up for spam by including a consent checkbox above or below the mandatory ‘agree to terms and conditions’ one – and sometimes also demands that you choose a password to register your account.
All of this takes time, and the time it takes is carefully calculated to occupy the exact period your passing train or metro is in a station within coverage so you can’t actually do anything useful with your brief moment of connectivity.
Even when you’re having a leisurely visit to a coffee shop, it’s one of life’s small but regular irritants.
It’s great to see Apple reduce the number of times we have to go through this nonsense, but I’d love to see the company go further, and take the lead in developing a new standard for the cursed things. Let’s have one database where we agree to one standard set of terms and conditions, and where all our Apple devices are registered. Then captive portals check that one database and immediately let us in.
This initiative would ideally be an industry-wide one working with all devices, but Apple has enough clout on its own to persuade hotspot providers to sign up for it, and it would make another small contribution to the ecosystem benefits if it were limited to Apple devices.
Is this something you’d like to see, if we can’t actually have captive portals die a slow and painful death? Please take our poll, and share your thoughts in the comments.
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