While iOS 26’s Liquid Glass design deservedly got most of the attention at Apple’s WWDC 2025 keynote, there were still several other additions worth talking about. These include a bunch of new Apple Music enhancements, such as lyrics translation, a new DJ-like feature called AutoMix, and animated cover art on the lock screen. Here are all the new Apple Music features in iOS 26.

Lyrics Translation for your favorite songs

Apple Music has had time-synced lyrics for a while now, which works great when you speak the language of the song. However, it’s not as helpful when you’re listening to songs in different languages, and that’s where Lyrics Translation comes in. It adds translations below each time-synced lyric line, making it easy to follow the song’s meaning, too. This hasn’t yet been added to all songs, but I expect that to change over the coming months.

Learn how to pronounce lyrics correctly

Another iOS 26 lyrics upgrade lets Apple Music show you the correct pronunciations for lyrics in foreign languages. Not every song has lyrics in the Roman script, so if you can’t read the alphabet they’re in, this new feature will help you learn how to pronounce those words. It does this by showing you a transliteration from the original script to Roman, which makes it easier to sing along.

AutoMix is an AI DJ for your playlists

AutoMix is a new addition to Apple Music’s playback controls. You’ll see it alongside the Shuffle, Repeat, and Autoplay buttons. When enabled, AutoMix will analyze the audio features of songs and use DJ-like tricks such as time stretching and beat matching to deliver continuous playback. Some people may like this, but I tried this during a run today and I’m not a big fan. I make lots of custom playlists on Apple Music, and some of those are painstakingly curated by matching the sounds at the end of one song with the start of the next one. AutoMix undid all my hard work and made the transitions feel unnatural. This may work for some types of playlists and for people who don’t care much about transitions, but it’s not doing much for me.

Pin your favorite playlists

This is a sweet feature that lets you quickly open your favorite Apple Music playlists. You can press and hold any playlist in the Music app in iOS 26, and pin it to the top of the Library tab. If you’ve pinned your favorite contacts in Messages, then you’ll find music pinning to be a familiar feature.

Animated cover art comes to your lock screen

Animated cover art is one of the more visually appealing features of Apple Music, and now it’s coming to your lock screen as well. When you play a song that has animated album art, you can tap the player on the lock screen to see it in a neat full-screen view.

A karaoke feature for Apple TV users

Apple Music is also getting a new feature called Sing, which only works if you have an iPhone with iOS 26 and an Apple TV running tvOS 26. With all those requirements in place, you can use your iPhone as a mic and have your voice amplified by Apple Music to have a fun karaoke experience right at home.

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I’ve previously shared the Good News about mosquito dunks, which stop mosquitoes from being able to breed in standing water. For the third year running, I am using dunks to create what’s sometimes called a “mosquito bucket of doom,” a trap that entices mosquitoes to breed in standing water that you have (muahahaha) poisoned against them. 

Not only is a bucket of doom easy to create—it took about five minutes, and my elementary-aged daughter did most of the work—it’s also more effective than other mosquito control attempts, like mosquito foggers. 

Why the bucket of doom is more effective than other types of mosquito management

There are three main ways of dealing with a mosquito problem in your yard: 

• Keep the mosquitoes away from you personally, with box fans, bug spray, and barriers like screening. They’re still out there, but at least they aren’t biting you.

• Kill adult mosquitoes, for example with foggers. Those individual mosquitoes won’t be able to bite anymore, since they’re dead, but the small amount you’ve managed to kill is not much of a dent in the mosquito population. This is the least effective strategy.

• Kill larvae or interfere with breeding. This is where the bucket of doom comes in. You’ll eliminate breeding sites in your yard, except for that very special bucket. The bucket will kill the baby mosquitoes before they can grow up. 

The first and third options are the ones that will make a difference: box fans and bug spray for yourself, mosquito breeding control for your yard. If you’re interested in trying to kill adult mosquitoes, read up on adulticides. They can be toxic to other insects like bees. They also don’t tend to help mosquito problems unless you can manage to kill a lot of the adult mosquitoes, which can be difficult and expensive.

The bucket of doom is an easy and effective form of breeding control, but be aware that it works best in places where there aren’t other breeding sites for the mosquitoes. If you live next door to a swamp, the bucket may not help much. On the other hand, if you’re in a place where you and your neighbors are good about cleaning up stagnant water, the bucket will be more effective.

How a mosquito bucket of doom works

First, you need to understand the mosquito life cycle. (There are different species, with different preferences about who to bite and where to breed, but the same basic facts apply.)

Just as butterflies have a larval stage (the caterpillar), mosquitoes also have a larval stage and an adult flying stage. Females lay their eggs in or near water, and the larvae are aquatic. If you’ve ever looked into a bucket or pond and noticed wriggling wormy things near the surface, those were mosquito larvae. They hang upside down, breathing through a tube in their butts (I promise I am not making this up) but can swim around to hide or to look for microscopic bits of food to eat. 

They pupate (like caterpillars) and emerge from the water as adult mosquitoes. Male and female adults drink flower nectar (!!!) which is enough to keep them alive, but when a female is ready to breed, she needs protein. That’s where the biting comes in. She needs a “blood meal” to be able to build those little baby mosquito eggs. So she bites you, drinks a drop of your blood, and then a few days later she lays her eggs. Then the cycle can begin again.

The entire life cycle only takes a few weeks, so mosquitoes will breed (and bite) continuously all season. We’re going to disrupt this process by poisoning the water that the larvae live in. The eggs will hatch, but the larvae will die.

Is a mosquito bucket of doom safe? 

One of the things I love about the bucket of doom is that it targets mosquitoes and doesn’t affect most other insects, nor people and animals. 

The “poison” that we’re using is actually just a naturally occurring bacterium with the scientific name Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis (often abbreviated Bti). This type of bacteria makes a toxin that can kill mosquitoes, fungus gnats, and blackflies, but Bti is nontoxic to mammals, birds, and fish. Insects that don’t breed in water aren’t affected by dunks, so butterflies and bees are safe. 

A bucket of water can be a safety hazard for small children and for animals, just because they could fall into it and drown. If your bucket of doom is in an area where children, pets, or wildlife could access it, consider covering the bucket with a barrier. Chicken wire makes an easy DIY cover, but if you want something a little neater looking, use a hydroponic basket that snaps onto the top of the bucket. 

How to make a mosquito bucket of doom

First, gather your supplies: 

• A bucket (the 5-gallon kind they sell at Home Depot is perfect)

• A package of mosquito dunks or granules that contain Bti

• Some organic matter like leaves or hay

• A lid, as described above (optional)

There’s an area of my yard where we often have a bucket or two around, and those buckets tend to fill up with rain. Obviously I dump them when I notice, but every now and then I’ve seen mosquito larvae in one of those buckets. Gross. So that’s where I decided to set up my first bucket of doom. 

I’ve seen the larvae even when there wasn’t any obvious source of nutrients in the bucket, but the instructions from university websites usually mention adding some hay, straw, or other organic matter. I asked my daughter to gather up some dry leaves from the corners of the yard and driveway. Then we filled the bucket partway with water, before adding the magic ingredient. Here are the steps so you can follow along: 

1. Add plant matter (hay, straw, leaves) to the bucket. 

2. Add water to the bucket, making a nice little pond for the mosquitoes.

3. Drop in ¼ of a mosquito dunk, or the amount indicated on the package.

How to maintain your bucket of doom throughout the summer

My package said a quarter of a doughnut-shaped dunk is appropriate for controlling mosquitoes in one square foot of surface area, so we used a quarter dunk for our bucket. (Some photos online show people using a full dunk per bucket; that’s probably overkill.) You will need to add a new dunk monthly. 

I got my dunks for a little under $20 for a pack of 20, so let’s say I’m paying 25 cents per month to reduce the mosquito population. Add the cost of the bucket ($4.99 if you don’t already have one sitting around at home) and that’s less than $7 for a summer’s worth of mosquito protection. 

Make more than one bucket if you have a big yard or just want to cover your bases in multiple locations (maybe one in the backyard, one by your front porch). And remember, you still need to dump out all of your non-poisoned standing water. The bucket of doom works best when it’s the mosquitoes’ only option. 

People who use these buckets tend to report that they noticed far fewer mosquitoes in the months that followed, and I have definitely found that to be true. Mosquitoes take a few weeks to go through their life cycle, so don’t expect results instantly—but if you maintain your bucket and take care to eliminate other sources of standing water, you should notice there aren’t as many mosquitoes around this year as usual. 

We’re living in a post-privacy world. Every time you leave the house you’re probably on camera. Every time you turn on your television, your viewing habits are being logged. And using the internet in any way is basically just spraying a firehose of your personal information at data brokers—companies that compile your personal information and sell it to marketing companies, people search sites, and anyone else who wants to use it to sell you something.

The phrase “data brokers” might conjure up a bunch of shady companies located in countries with loose privacy laws, but some of the biggest are actually familiar companies like Experian, LexisNexis, and Equifax. The data they gather can include your name, address, birthday, phone numbers, income, known associates (like your family members), and everything you do on social media platforms. Anyone with that info can use it to blast you with endless advertisements and spam emails and texts—and if bad actors get ahold of it in a data leak, they can use it maliciously to steal your identity.

If you want to beef up your online privacy and help protect yourself from spam and scams, one of the main things you need to do is get your personal data out of the data brokers’ servers. You can opt out manually (a tedious, never-ending game of whack-a-mole), or you can pay a service to do it for you.

You can try to opt-out manually

Typically you can choose to opt-out from data brokers and other sites that collect your data, but doing so involves a lot of work. You’ll have to go to each and every individual data broker’s website and look for their opt-out pages, which are typically deeply buried to discourage you. You’ll also need to stem the flow of information headed to them by adjusting the settings on your devices, removing unused apps, clearing your browser history and cache, setting it to forget cookies, and using Google “results about you” tool to remove search results containing your personal information. You might even start using a virtual private network (VPN) to remain as hidden as possible.

You’ll need to stay vigilant, however, and repeat this process on a regular basis, as even once deleted, your information will trickle back out over time.

The good news is, if you don’t want to make your privacy a full-time job, you can pay a service to do it for you. While most data removal services won’t be any more effective than manual efforts, they will do the boring work for you, saving you a ton of time.

The best online data removal services

There are a number of data removal services that can handle clearing your information from data brokers. Here are five of the most useful:

Optery

Optery has a free version that makes manually removing your data from broker sites a little bit easier, but the paid version covers a pretty comprehensive list of brokers, is AI-assisted, and offers removal verification. In one study, it was found to have a successful removal rate of 68%, which is just a hair under the 70% removal rate you can expect if you do it manually. It will continue with automated removals as long as you pay for the service.

Cost: $3.99 per month or $39 annually.

EasyOptOuts

With a second-best removal rate of 65%, EasyOptOuts is a relatively effective data removal tool that costs a lot less money than Optery, which is only slightly more effective. EasyOptOuts doesn’t have many fancy bells and whistles, but it slogs through all the online sites that collect your data and requests removal pretty reliably. It will even request removal from sites it can’t crawl, just to be safe. Considering how affordable it is, it’s a worthwhile choice.

Cost: $19.99 annually

IDX

IDX is an effective data removal service that has the most flexible platform in terms of services. It offers three tiers: Identity (mainly just monitoring, with no removal services), Privacy (probably the best choice if data removal is your priority), and Complete (which includes lots of other tools, like a credit locker).

Cost: $8.96/month (Identity), $11.66/month (Privacy), $32.90/month (Complete), with family plans also available

Kanary

Kanary also offers a free version that’s relatively limited and doesn’t help you with manual removal of your data—it just reports where your data has been located—but you can use it without a credit card, so you can test the service out before deciding whether to pay for it to actually remove your data from those sites. On the other hand, its app is only available for Apple devices, with a waitlist for Android phones and tablets. Some reviews have noted that Kanary’s net is a bit too wide, flagging your social media accounts for cleanup, which you probably don’t want it to do.

Cost: $12 per month or $105 annually (family plans are also available)

Permission Slip

Launched by Consumer Reports, Permission Slip is a free data removal service app. Some folks have raised privacy concerns about it due to its fairly complex user agreement, but for zero dollars it can definitely automate a lot of the work required to delete your private data from broker sites, and so it’s worth considering.

Cost: Free (donations appreciated)

Do you need one of these services?

Whether one of these services is a good deal for you depends on how much spare time you can donate to clearing up your data footprint, and how annoyed you are that faceless corporations know so much about you. You could always start with Permission Slip as a free option to see if it makes a difference, then evaluate a paid option later. But whether you do it yourself or pay someone to handle it, removing your personal data from data brokers is always a good idea, given data breaches have become a near everyday occurrence.

Last week, Poshmark announced that it’s in the early stages of a partnership with Facebook Marketplace that could significantly increase the reach of sellers’ listings. As a diehard user of both digital resale platforms, I found this news particularly exciting, so I reached out to Poshmark for more information. Here’s what you need to know about the fledgling venture and what it may mean for you—whether you buy, sell, or both on either marketplace.

The major Poshmark and Facebook Marketplace news

The partnership is in the testing stage: Right now, only a few Poshmark sellers will see their listings crossposted to Facebook Marketplace. If and when it expands, sellers can expect to see their Poshmark listings appear on Facebook Marketplace. Essentially, any item listed on Poshmark will automatically be shown to potential buyers on Facebook Marketplace—and any resulting purchase or transaction will take place through Poshmark’s established platform, even if they don’t have a Poshmark account.

“Shoppers can seamlessly purchase Poshmark items through the Facebook app, regardless of whether or not they have the Poshmark app installed,” the rep tells me. “Clicking ‘Check out now with Poshmark’ will direct the shopper to our guest checkout webpage, embedded within the Facebook app.”

Why this collaboration seems useful

I use Poshmark every day to sell my clothes, but I also browse Facebook Marketplace pretty frequently to source home decor. I’m a seasoned resale seller and shopper, but never really considered looking for clothing or accessories on Facebook. As the rep pointed out to me, though, Facebook does have an “expansive audience”: Over three billion people use the app. Of course, not all of them are using Marketplace. But if even a few extra eyeballs land on my listings, that increases my chance of making a sale.

Why it’s useful for sellers

Per the rep, “This collaboration is about making Poshmark closets more accessible.” I know from my own experience that though there are people who browse a variety of marketplaces, there are pretty distinct populations on each app. Putting my listings on multiple platforms increases the chance that they’ll be seen by someone who might not have seen them if I’d kept to one app.

With this new integration, the chances are higher that your listings will be seen by brand-new prospective buyers.

Why it’s useful for buyers

If you’re not a Poshmark user but you (like, apparently, most people) use Facebook Marketplace, you’ll now be able to access listings for the kinds of things Poshmark is best known for offering. That mean you can browse for clothing, accessories, and shoes, in addition to broader categories like electronics and decor—alongside the local goods offered on Facebook Marketplace. It makes the buying experience that much easier.

Things to keep in mind

You should know that the Facebook Marketplace experiment isn’t fully replicating the Poshmark experience. Poshmark is full of unique ways to buy and sell that aren’t being translated over to Facebook at this time, including live shows where everyday people can auction off goods on a QVC-style stream and Posh Parties, which are landing pages featuring specific categories of listings.

Another reason Poshmark is great is that buyers can “bundle” multiple listings from a seller’s storefront (known as a closet). If you like three things someone has for sale in their closet, you can put them in a bundle so the seller only has to ship one package. This saves you a lot on shipping, but most of the time, sellers will give you bundle at a discount, too, saving you even more.

That’s not happening with the Facebook Marketplace cross-listing, at least not right now.

What I’d like to see

If the beta test is successful, I hope to see this rolled out on a larger scale. It would be cool if bundling became possible via Facebook Marketplace; simulcasts of live show streams would also be ideal. Poshmark’s live shows are popular and innovative (I watch them all the time and have been playing around with the idea of hosting one), and I’d like to see them broaden their reach to Meta’s substantial audience.

Resale is poised to see a massive increase in the post-tariff economic landscape. With the threat of everything becoming more expensive, buying used is becoming an attractive option for more people, placing platforms like Poshmark and Facebook Marketplace at the forefront of the boom. Whether you’re an established seller or buyer or new to all of this, this joint venture may very well help you navigate what’s to come a little more easily.