Apple iOS 26 Brings Flight Tracking to Your Lock Screen
Monday’s WWDC 2025 keynote event in California delivered plenty of excitement for tech enthusiasts, but it was a particular announcement about Apple Wallet that caught my attention as a frequent flyer. Apple is essentially “Sherlocking” one of the most - my most - beloved travel apps in the ecosystem, and I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it.
For those unfamiliar with the term, “Sherlocking” refers to Apple incorporating features from third-party apps directly into iOS, often making those apps redundant. The term comes from when Apple killed the popular Watson app by integrating similar features into macOS Sherlock.
This time, the target is Flighty, the award-winning flight tracking iPhone, iPad, and macOS app that’s become indispensable for many of us. I’d give up my American Express before I gave up Flighty.
What’s Coming in iOS 26
The headline iOS feature for travellers this year is flight tracking via Live Activities directly in Apple Wallet. Your boarding passes will now support real-time updates on your iPhone’s lock screen, showing arrival times, gate changes, delays, and other crucial flight information without needing to unlock your phone or open a separate app.
From Apple PR:
“In Apple Wallet, a refreshed boarding pass experience delivers rich, relevant information straight to users’ fingertips with Live Activities that offer real-time updates about their flights. For added convenience, users can also share their flight’s Live Activities so friends and family can stay up to date on their journeys.”
But Apple isn’t stopping there. The updated Wallet app will display relevant contextual information below your boarding pass, including Apple Maps directions to the appropriate airport terminal, quick access to Find My for baggage tracking, and other travel-related shortcuts. Maps is also getting comprehensive airport navigation with information about gates, security checkpoints, shops, baggage claim areas, restaurants, and restrooms.
Sound familiar? These are features that Flighty has been perfecting for years, and the app even won an Apple Design Award for its excellence. The irony isn’t lost on me.
Apple Wallet is becoming more powerful
It was 2012 when Apple first introduced what we now know as Apple Wallet, that is getting these new flight tracking features in September. Originally called Passbook, it launched with iOS 6 as Apple’s answer to digital tickets and passes. The concept was simple but revolutionary: store boarding passes, event tickets, loyalty cards, and coupons in one centralised location.
The app was renamed to Apple Wallet in 2015 with iOS 9, and its capabilities have steadily expanded. Today, it handles everything from boarding passes and concert tickets to credit cards for Apple Pay, student ID cards, and even car keys.
The newly announced iOS 26 software, which has been made available to developers this week, carries the new flight tracking features, but considering it is using the Wallet Kit framework, it would not be unlikely that this requires each airline to enable the features.
Australian frequent flyers will be familiar with how tardy our local airlines are with adopting modern operating system frameworks and technologies.
While we’re on Apple Wallet, many don’t know that it already includes a fantastic travel feature called Express Transit Mode that can make your travel experience smoother. In cities with compatible public transport systems like Brisbane, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, New York City, Paris, Singapore, Sydney, and Washington DC, you can set up Express Transit to automatically pay for trains, buses, and trams without Face ID, Touch ID, or even waking your iPhone.
Simply tap your phone on the reader and go. It works brilliantly in cities like London, Hong Kong, and increasingly in Australian cities where contactless payments are supported.
The Flighty Question
Flighty has carved out a devoted following in the travel community by doing one thing exceptionally well: flight tracking. The app doesn’t just show you flight status; it provides rich context, beautiful visualisations, and features like tracking friends’ flights, managing check-ins, and detailed flight history. It’s become the gold standard for flight tracking apps.
The concern for Flighty isn’t just about competition—it’s about existential threat. When Apple integrates similar functionality directly into the operating system, third-party apps often struggle to justify their existence. Why download and pay for Flighty when iOS does the basics for free?
However, there’s hope for apps like Flighty. Apple’s implementation, while convenient, will likely focus on core functionality rather than the rich feature set that makes dedicated apps special.
Flighty’s social features, detailed analytics, flight predictions, incoming aircraft monitoring, airport delay awareness, and sophisticated notification system probably aren’t going anywhere soon.
What This Means for Frequent Flyers
For us as travellers, these changes represent a win regardless of how the app ecosystem shakes out. Having flight information readily available on the lock screen eliminates friction from one of the most stressful parts of travel: staying informed about your flight status.
The airport navigation features in Maps could be particularly valuable. Anyone who’s wandered around Terminal 2 at Melbourne Airport looking for a decent coffee or frantically searching for the correct gate at Changi will appreciate having this information integrated into the Maps app they’re already using.
The integration with Find My for baggage tracking is also clever. While AirTags in luggage have become common practice among frequent flyers, having a direct link from your boarding pass to the Find My app streamlines the process of checking on your bags.
This move reflects Apple’s broader strategy of reducing friction in everyday digital interactions. By bringing more functionality into core iOS apps, Apple creates a more seamless experience for users while potentially reducing the number of third-party apps they need to manage.
From Apple’s perspective, this makes perfect sense. The company has been working to make Wallet the central hub for digital credentials and transactions. Adding flight tracking elevates Wallet from a simple digital wallet to a comprehensive travel companion.
The timing is also noteworthy. As travel continues rebounding to pre-pandemic levels, Apple is positioning iOS as the operating system that understands and anticipates travellers’ needs. Live Activities for flights, enhanced airport maps, and integrated baggage tracking create a compelling travel experience that’s hard to replicate on other platforms.
The first iOS 26 developer beta is available now, with a public beta expected next month and the full release coming later this year in our spring. For frequent flyers, this represents an interesting inflection point where our beloved third-party apps may need to evolve or risk obsolescence.
Flighty and similar apps will need to double down on their unique value propositions—the features that Apple is unlikely to replicate. This might mean more social features, better analytics, integration with loyalty programmes, or enhanced prediction capabilities.
For those of us who’ve relied on apps like Flighty, the transition period will be interesting to watch. Will the convenience of built-in flight tracking be enough to replace the rich feature sets we’ve grown accustomed to? Or will there be enough differentiation for both to coexist?
What’s certain is that iOS 26 will make flight tracking more accessible to the mainstream traveller. Features that were once the domain of dedicated travel apps will now be available to every iPhone user by default. Whether that’s a net positive for the travel app ecosystem remains to be seen, but for frequent flyers, it’s another step toward a more seamless travel experience.
The real test will be in the execution. Apple has a mixed track record with travel features, sometimes nailing the basics while missing the nuanced needs of frequent travellers. If iOS 26’s flight tracking captures even half of what makes Flighty special, it’ll be a win for anyone who spends significant time in airports and well worth the $75 odd Australian dollars a year.
When I’m due in Sydney in two hours, Flighty takes my anxiety away but software feature redundancy isn’t always a bad thing, nor are freebie features included on your default operating system, especially when your flight is delayed and you need information fast.
The Slow Death—and Occasional Resurrection—of Original Reporting
“Have ABC or the Courier-Mail run it yet?"
That was the standing order when I worked the CMS at 4BC radio.
No matter how solid the tip or tweet, nothing went live until a “bigger” outlet blessed it first. The policy didn’t just throttle scoops; it taught an entire shift of producers to become professional copy-pasters.
“Become a source for news lots of people want, and can’t find anywhere else.”
— Katie Drummond, Wired
Drummond’s line is a manifesto for a business model that most publishers have abandoned. Original digging is costly, slow, legally risky and—crucially—doesn’t scale with CPM ads. The result is churnalism: Google “DOGE agency” or “Siri delay” and you’ll find dozens of articles that quote one another, not the underlying documents.
Exhibit A — John Gruber’s Apple Intelligence mea culpa
“In the two decades I’ve been in this racket, I’ve never been angrier at myself for missing a story …”
— John Gruber, Daring Fireball
Every Apple Intelligence feature demoed at WWDC 2025 shipped; the ambitious, un-demoed “personalised Siri” suite didn’t. Gruber’s 6,000-word post—“Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino” (12 Mar 2025)—was a public flogging of his own blind spot. Why did the wider tech press whiff too? Because they were busy quoting one another’s ecstatic AI takes instead of checking developer seeds or asking engineers whether the code existed.
Exhibit B — Patrick McGee’s Apple in China
Financial Times veteran Patrick McGee handed in his manuscript in September 2024. Over the next eight months Apple’s China exposure collided with a fresh round of Trump tariffs, yet tech desks were glued to OpenAI press releases. When Apple in China finally dropped (13 May 2025), reviewers called it “prophetic”, but the reporting had been finished for almost a year. The scoop potential was there; the ad-driven incentive was not.
Exhibit C — Wired’s 62,000-subscriber spike
When Elon Musk took charge of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in January, Wired went all-in—“several stories a day, seven days a week,” as Drummond puts it.
“After a week, I looked around and said, ‘Where is everyone else? Why aren’t other news organisations covering this?’” Business Insider
The vacuum was so obvious, Wired signed 62,500 paying subscribers in two weeks. Readers literally paid to reward reporting nobody else bothered to do.
Why This Keeps Happening?
Cost pressure: Shrinking head-counts, wages not meeting inflation, senior staff not staying on the beat, freelance rates that don’t cover FOI fees | No budget for research or visits.
Ad-first metrics: Speed beats depth; SEO beats shoe-leather. Hot takes out-rank deep stories.
Litigation risk: Australia’s defamation law / US SLAPP threats chill stories. Editors spike anything without a spare legal war-chest.
Platform algorithms: Virality skews towards the same “shiny object” (right now: AI). Homogenised front pages.
I’m sure there’s other factors not even on my radar today including audience care-factor.
The Fallout
- Unsexy beats (local councils, supply chains) wither.
- Corporations spin unchecked because no reporter wants to be the lone sceptic.
- News ‘breaks’ via Police social media or emergency service press release.
- Audiences see identical copy across 12 sites and decide the press is “lazy”.
How We Fix It (a non-complete list)
- Fund the digging. Subscriptions aren’t charity; they’re R&D for democracy.
- Celebrate articles that wreck your priors. Surprise is the price of learning.
- Demand receipts. If a story leans entirely on “sources familiar”, ask for the paper trail, The Verge does this well.
- Back legal defence funds. Lawsuits stop more stories than lack of curiosity.
- Publish your changelog. Post the list: people spoken to, documents read, and known unknowns.
“If everyone’s writing the same story, there’s a story missing.” — David Carr
Let’s go find the missing ones.
How I create a ceremony
A music festival of one-hit wonders
Here’s my big idea for the day: A music festival of one-hit wonders.
No filler. No B-sides. Just back-to-back greatness.
A full festival, massive stadium PA system, but every song is only the one song you came for.
The band gets on stage, plays their one hit, then gets off stage.
My line-up for a One Hit Wonder Festival:
- Things of Stone and Wood – Happy Birthday Helen
- Bachelor Girl – Buses and Trains
- Lo-Tel – Teenager of the Year
- Amiel – Lovesong
- Gotye feat. Kimbra – Somebody That I Used to Know
- Nathaniel – You
- Orianthi – According to You
- Josh Abrahams feat. Amiel – Addicted to Bass
- Crazy Town – Butterfly (Epic will sub in for Shifty if needed)
- Len – Steal My Sunshine
- New Radicals – You Get What You Give
- Chumbawamba – Tubthumping
- Sir Mix-a-Lot – Baby Got Back
- Nena – 99 Luftballons (the German version only of course)
- Daniel Powter – Bad Day
- Toni Basil – Mickey
- Dexys Midnight Runners – Come On Eileen
- A Flock of Seagulls – I Ran (So Far Away)
- Southern Sons – Heart in Danger
- Blind Melon – No Rain
- Baz Luhrmann – Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen) - yes I am serious this would be amazing
- Vanessa Carlton – A Thousand Miles
- Right Said Fred – I’m Too Sexy
- The Buggles – Video Killed the Radio Star
- Rhubarb - Exerciser
🎟 One stadium. One song each. No fillers. Just pure one-hit-wonder gold from start to finish.
Make it happen, music industry.
I was asking for a Mac app recommendation from Claude but now I’m a Mac developer.
An ounce of originality is worth a pound of imitation.
– Orson Welles
There is only one thing worse than being imitated, and that is not being imitated.
– Coco Chanel
I sat next to a young honeymooning couple from Guatemala on my flight home to Tassie tonight.
They booked their entire Australia holiday based on ChatGPT planning their itinerary.
I added some local understanding to a few of the routes in Tassie they wanted, but it was a pretty good trip. Hamilton Island, Sydney, Tasmania, covering all their wants in the holiday.
If you haven’t figured out how AI is going to change your business or employment like it’s changing travel then you’re behind the eight ball.
I’d also love to have that conversation with you, particularly if you don’t know how ChatGPT figures out who and how to recommend what it recommends.
New blog post on my wedding celebrant website: The long and gradual cancellation of Josh Withers
The way we’re going here we’ll be on ICQ soon and I am here for it: Friendster is back.
My favourite Charles Bukowski quote is “The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts and the stupid ones are full of confidence.” Mainly because when you share it, some people are too confident it’s about them.
Today’s another one of those weird days in the best and most beautiful, yet also so strange, wedding industry. Sometime in a few years over a beer remind me to tell you the story about the Tasmanian Wedding Directory
My only experiences with electric vehicles are in renting them, and I rent quite a few as I travel.
The out-of-home charging infrastructure is bad.
Three stories from today:
- I’m staying at my mother-in-law’s home in suburban Gold Coast and the nearest public charging infrastructure is a 15 minute drive away. It’s got two charging bays, each time I visit there’s a queue.
- I had a long drive today and needed to charge in Brisbane before the drive. I get fee Chargefox charging with my Sixt rental but the best located charging station was at a BP. The app - BP Pulse - is yet another horrible corporate app that forgets logins, doesn’t work well, and the third BP app I have on my phone. The working charger didn’t work, and the second was pre-identified as not working. So once the “working charger” had not charged the charging cable was locked and would not come out of the car. The BYD Atto’s manual is electronic and requires the car have internet access. There are three methods to manually unlock, it took me to the third method.
- Charging station locations on Apple Maps and Google Maps sucks. Tonight I wanted to charge at a certain charger and I started the journey in a no-service area so I used BYD in-built maps which don’t know about an exit that had changed so I missed the exit and almost ran out of battery because I couldn’t charge at the BP charger earlier. Further to that I’m now charging at a charger in Brisbane city that’s not on any mapping application but is in the Chargefox app, however in the app it’s across the road and a few hundred metres away and apparently in a construction yard.
It’s a weird time to be a travelling EV driver.
Modern man is in a terrible predicament. He is helplessly enamoured with the beauty of what the old world built, yet despises the beliefs that inspired them to build it.
On 65x24 and editors
On the same day Fuji announced invest a new camera (which I would love to own!) I discover an app that shoots in one of the Fuji’s built-in aspect ratios, made famous by Hasselblad: 65x24.
The thing that breaks my mind about crops like this is that you’re leaving good pixels on the table.
Which activates a traumatised part of my brain. But also reminds mee of the power of a good editor. That the best editors know what to remove, not what to add.
picked up a new cool domain name for my non-personal and non-wedding blogging: thesmh.com.au
I've been learning about SEO and GEO and could help you too
Over the past two years I have become really disillusioned with advertising and marketing agencies. I’m in a weird, niche, very unique field, so it’s possibly my fault, but on all the accounts I can recall the provider of the marketing, advertising, and SEO services has also let me down professionally.
A friend who is a professional SEO operator took payment for services then never replied to a message after then. Colleagues in the wedding industry took payment for marketing services, then stopped responding when I questioned the low effectiveness of the ads. Countless stories of poor performance. Thousands of dollars wasted on stupid strategies.
So I’ve taken it upon myself to stop paying people and to learn to do it myself and I’ve spent the last year reading and studying SEO and GEO. SEO is optimisation for the search engines like Google, Bing, Kagi etc, and GEO is optimisation for the LLM AI products like ChatGPT and Claude.
I’ve been implementing these new skills and I’m now in the stage of seeing results. Slowly but surely, which is the only true way to win in SEO and GEO, over the long game. Anyone promising a short game win is doing dodgy work that will no doubt come unstuck eventually.
I’m actually happy enough to share my strategy because it’s not really my strategy, it’s just me doing what the search engines, LLMs, and industry says to do. Apparently it’s all out there in black and white ready for you and I to learn and read. We just mostly ignore it and then complain about the algorithm.
It’s a three pronged solution:
- Website speed and technicalities
- Content on your website
- Content on other websites aka backlinks.
Website speed
The easiest way to slice this is to enter your webpages in the PageSpeed Insights tool and to get your pages to 100/100/100/100 on desktop and mobile. It’s hard work.
I eventually gave up trying to get those scores on Squarespace and Wordpress websites and I learned static site generators. In particular, Astro.
This is just an incentives game. Slow websites cost the crawlers literal money because it takes longer to crawl each page. They don’t like you if you cost them money, plus users don’t like you either.
Content on your own website
It turns out that these algorithms don’t know what we don’t tell them. So we need to tell them what we’re about, what we’re good at, what we’re experts and authorities at. In lots of words and photos. A lot of the time. All the time. For a long time.
This basically means blogging but also the whole website should really tell your story. In words.
I’ve gone to great lengths to talk about marriage law and the essentials on my Hobart Marriage Office website, about Hobart wedding celebrancy on my Hobart wedding celebrant website, eloping to Tasmania on my Elope to Tassie blog, and about weddings on my Wedding Magazine blog.
Content on other people’s websites
This starts with social media and Reddit links and call outs, but goes on to people in the same areas of expertise linking to you, and I’ve gone a little farther. I’ve been finding websites that were abandoned by their former owners, and building out websites there like I have on celebrantforyou.net.au or The Tasmanians.
If you have a good and fast website, that explains your whole deal, and others verify that, you can win online.
Feel free to steal this whole strategy, or, hire me to do it for you or to coach you along it. I’m offering the coaching for $100 a month or $1000 a year (commit to a year because it takes that long to really win well), $450 a month or $4500 a year to do it for you if you are a small local business looking to win in one geography, or if you have a larger business we can talk about about something that would suit.
I’m still loving weddings and love doing them, but I looked at my schedule and I could afford to take on 5-10 clients for SEO and GEO, so get in touch if you’d like the help.
The human spirit is a beautiful cacophony of stupidity and kindness.
If that beautiful mixture of stupidity and kindness is out of balance, well, that’s why we have journalism and social media.