The wallet app UI is the peak of Apple's 'single 20y/o in sf' design.
Anyone that has multiple card from the same bank (because, say you have a personal account and a shared account with your partner) has to do the "pick between the two identical looking top 20px of cards" dance every time they use Wallet to pay for something. It is mind-boggling that the current UI persists.
What a relief. My awful workaround was photos of all my membership barcodes labeled with a sharpie so that I can search "Gym" or "Library" or whatever to pull them up from OCR indexing.
I've been using Pass4Wallet for the last few years to create Wallet entries for local clubs I'm apart of.
It's actually better than native passes in some cases because you can add custom info to the entry, like a gate code. It's really flexible in terms of barcodes, QR codes, etc as well.
Great app I'll probably continue using, I'm not confident Apple will allow the amount of customizability it allows.
I'm using MakePass for ages now. Got it when it was still a single purchase and got grandfathered into their new license model. It allows you to use almost all features of the PassKit API. Very happy with it - let's see how the native feature compares.
There's many third party apps that can already create passes based on pictures. They are just adding that feature to the OS which is great of course but it has already been possible for a long time, except that there's one more step of downloading an app...but should still be quicker than searching your library every time.
It's not awful on its own, but the alternative could be double-tapping the power button and having them immediately available on screen in a nice scroll UX along with everything else you consider to be in your "wallet".
As someone who does roughly the same thing, the language used to describe the new capabilities isn't encouraging to me; I don't want to "add a pass", I want to "add a photo" and bypass all of this other complexity entirely.
An option to override automatic (un)archival of passes is also desperately needed. Some passes just don’t expire based on time, and too many pass creators are too incompetent to put the correct time in even if they do.
Airlines in particular are prone to things like using local time in a field expecting UTC, which has made boarding passes auto-archive hours before leaving for the airport for me…
IMO one of the cool things about Wallet is the notification that appears on the homescreen when you're in proximity of the venue or time of the event and automatically displays the pass when tapped. I wonder if "create your own" will be able to do that (I'm not sure how it would)?
For one, the article doesn't suggest that this will indeed be allowed as a part of that process. OTOH: it's easy for a flight ticket pass (which has time and airport location) but not for a gym membership pass (time can be anything and the gym can have several locations.)
> A few places where we still help, even after iOS 27 ships:
> Google Wallet. Create a Pass is iPhone-only. Roughly half of the wallet-using world is on Android, and our generator builds Google Wallet passes from the same form.
What does this actually mean? Google Wallet has had a button to add your own passes for many years. How is the feature described here different?
The Wallet Pass[0] and PassKit[1] documentations are some of the sparsest and cryptic documentations around filled with absolutely archaic flows that _need_ to be supported for proper integration. If this solves the need of ever having to deal with those features ever again.
I thought this meant Apple was creating the ability for anyone to issue/sell passes/tickets through its wallet infrastructure. That would be much more significant.
Adding your own passes was possible before (I used websites to create passes from the phone; apps existed too) however that's been a hurdle. I wonder what the security implications of this would be. Could people snatch a QR code on my paper ticket to go to a Taylor Swift's concert instead of me?
I can't speak for all things, but I found that venues will often use like a rotating QR code or rely on NFC. I'm sure if this is something like a ticket for a concert, you'll just rely on the existing pass support from whatever service you're using because it'll require something more complex.
The way I'm interpreting this is that it's a way to abstract stagnant QR or barcode passes for smaller businesses and libraries. We'll see at the WWDC though.
Does Wallet allow apps to interact with the meta-data of cards, and/or update them in any way? This could be interesting for insurance cards, in particular. Upload & verify status periodically with a prompt to update, for example.
I'll have to see the workflow but I find it incredibly annoying to have tickets that you may or may not be able to put in the Wallet and maybe we'll send them to you a week before the event when you're traveling. Understand about airline checkins but keeping mental track of things like theater tickets or timed museum entries is really annoyinmg.
For whatever reason apple required passes to be digitally signed with an apple developer certificate. On the other hand a screenshot/pdf is "good enough" that they didn't bother fixing it.
You can double tap the lock button to open your wallet with all your passes. Also it automatically raises the brightness for QR passes to make it easier for readers.
You could do the same thing with shortcuts I guess but using the first class feature is nice.
I think Wallet might be the most used feature for many on the iPhone, especially if they pay with their phone. What makes you think it's looking for a problem to solve?
I think Wallet is great and the adoption in certain areas like boarding passes is almost 100% and it beats digging through email to find some pdf and zooming in on some QR code when you have to present it (Hoping that your screen doesn't rotate in the worst possible moment). Also many big cities support it for public transport and most banking apps allow you to use your credit cards there for Apple Pay.
I guess I consider Apple Pay via Wallet, which I use, to be different from Gym Membership via Wallet, which just doesn't seem worth the effort? Maybe I'm unusual.
Agreed. I use it basically every day. It's almost disquieting how quickly Apple inserted itself into payments, but it's frankly safer than a credit card and the NFC(?) works much better.
Being able to have train/bus passes on my phone whenever I go to another country is nice. Some places are a pain in the ass because even different cities have their own systems and they're all given names like IBCJ or JGCUVFGIB as if anyone is supposed to figure how to look them up. And oftentimes physical passes can only be bought from machines in select areas. And when going to undeveloped areas (particularly Europe), the few machines that do exist are broken and look like they were abandoned years ago, leaving the only option to track down where some rail staff are and trying to find someone who won't just wave you away without even looking at your face and hoping they'll help get you a pass instead of needing to get annoying one time tickets. Then sometimes places just tell you to install an app to buy tickets. That app requires a local phone number and address to verify.
Apple wallet lets me install passes and charge them up without even being in the country that I'll be visiting yet. It makes things massively more tedious. I wish more European countries supported it, because as much as Europeans have some weird pride in their public transportation, they're more complicated and backwards than even the poorest Asian nations. Being able to add any pass to Apple wallet would be a huge step in resolving that.
The kid behind the counter at most places is neither paid nor trained enough to identify if the digital card in my phone’s wallet comes from their app or if I made it myself.
I use Wallet purely to satisfy my collecting habit. I like to add movie tickets to it after purchasing them in the movie app, so I can look back at all the movies I've watched from many years ago until now.
I still see people amazed when I pay for stuff with my Apple Watch. The only other place I know that reliably uses the Apple Watch with wallet outside of payment is Disney World, but the experience there was ok at best as I was managing my entire family and I'm pretty sure they would rather sell you multiple magic bands, but seeing as how phones will never get smaller I'd love more places to support tapping my watch on things.
Ticketing is a great use-case for it, I have flight tickets, concerts/events tickets, airport bus tickets, if it keeps expanding to integrate with even more tickets (my local public transportation system, the express train to the airport, more venues) it will only become more useful.
Edit: also, all of my cards, I haven't used a physical card at POS terminals in years, they only get used on ATMs.
Basically anywhere you need to scan a QR code to get in, you can have a pass in Apple Wallet. I’ve never stored payment info in Apple Wallet. But every time I take a flight, I store my boarding pass in Apple Wallet. It’s than printing a physical boarding pass, it automatically updates metadata (e.g., flight times, gates), and it’s nicer than just a picture.
Previously, you could only add passes if the company supported it. So most airlines have Apple Wallet passes, but most gyms don’t. This update will allow you to create your own passes. Basically just storing the QR codes (and maybe some metadata?) in one easy-to-use place on your phone. I can imagine this being convenient for daily use so you don’t have to track a gym tag with a QR code and a library tag with a QR code, etc. Also nice for tickets to events.
It's kind of nice that I can put my Safeway and Soopercard in there now, but that still means having to scan the barcode, and frankly it's less cumbersome to just hand my physical card to the cashier. The only store that seems to have figured out how to automatically add their card to NFC payments is Maverik gas stations.
The wallet app UI is the peak of Apple's 'single 20y/o in sf' design.
Anyone that has multiple card from the same bank (because, say you have a personal account and a shared account with your partner) has to do the "pick between the two identical looking top 20px of cards" dance every time they use Wallet to pay for something. It is mind-boggling that the current UI persists.
What a relief. My awful workaround was photos of all my membership barcodes labeled with a sharpie so that I can search "Gym" or "Library" or whatever to pull them up from OCR indexing.
I've been using Pass4Wallet for the last few years to create Wallet entries for local clubs I'm apart of.
It's actually better than native passes in some cases because you can add custom info to the entry, like a gate code. It's really flexible in terms of barcodes, QR codes, etc as well.
Great app I'll probably continue using, I'm not confident Apple will allow the amount of customizability it allows.
Pass2U Wallet works great, but like many apps, it really should just be a feature to begin with.
You can also make passes for other people and send them / share them.
Looks like someone else recommended a competitor Pass4 Wallet as well, may need to go compare.
I'm using MakePass for ages now. Got it when it was still a single purchase and got grandfathered into their new license model. It allows you to use almost all features of the PassKit API. Very happy with it - let's see how the native feature compares.
There's many third party apps that can already create passes based on pictures. They are just adding that feature to the OS which is great of course but it has already been possible for a long time, except that there's one more step of downloading an app...but should still be quicker than searching your library every time.
I've got a Photos album called Keys.
I usually just put things like that in an album
Why is that awful? Sounds simple to me.
It's not awful on its own, but the alternative could be double-tapping the power button and having them immediately available on screen in a nice scroll UX along with everything else you consider to be in your "wallet".
As someone who does roughly the same thing, the language used to describe the new capabilities isn't encouraging to me; I don't want to "add a pass", I want to "add a photo" and bypass all of this other complexity entirely.
Finally!
An option to override automatic (un)archival of passes is also desperately needed. Some passes just don’t expire based on time, and too many pass creators are too incompetent to put the correct time in even if they do.
Airlines in particular are prone to things like using local time in a field expecting UTC, which has made boarding passes auto-archive hours before leaving for the airport for me…
IMO one of the cool things about Wallet is the notification that appears on the homescreen when you're in proximity of the venue or time of the event and automatically displays the pass when tapped. I wonder if "create your own" will be able to do that (I'm not sure how it would)?
I use Pass2U Wallet and set a location, if I end up at near Children's Museum or Community Center, my ID is ready.
Just enter the location and time in question as part of creating the pass?
For one, the article doesn't suggest that this will indeed be allowed as a part of that process. OTOH: it's easy for a flight ticket pass (which has time and airport location) but not for a gym membership pass (time can be anything and the gym can have several locations.)
> A few places where we still help, even after iOS 27 ships:
> Google Wallet. Create a Pass is iPhone-only. Roughly half of the wallet-using world is on Android, and our generator builds Google Wallet passes from the same form.
What does this actually mean? Google Wallet has had a button to add your own passes for many years. How is the feature described here different?
This is just parity with google wallet, right? AFAICT my library card in google wallet is just a generic card/pass type.
Google wallet did this from day one.
The Wallet Pass[0] and PassKit[1] documentations are some of the sparsest and cryptic documentations around filled with absolutely archaic flows that _need_ to be supported for proper integration. If this solves the need of ever having to deal with those features ever again.
[0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/walletpasses [1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/passkit
I thought this meant Apple was creating the ability for anyone to issue/sell passes/tickets through its wallet infrastructure. That would be much more significant.
I need this without knowing before that I needed this. Makes me question why this wasn’t implemented years ago. Anyway, great.
Adding your own passes was possible before (I used websites to create passes from the phone; apps existed too) however that's been a hurdle. I wonder what the security implications of this would be. Could people snatch a QR code on my paper ticket to go to a Taylor Swift's concert instead of me?
I can't speak for all things, but I found that venues will often use like a rotating QR code or rely on NFC. I'm sure if this is something like a ticket for a concert, you'll just rely on the existing pass support from whatever service you're using because it'll require something more complex.
The way I'm interpreting this is that it's a way to abstract stagnant QR or barcode passes for smaller businesses and libraries. We'll see at the WWDC though.
Does Wallet allow apps to interact with the meta-data of cards, and/or update them in any way? This could be interesting for insurance cards, in particular. Upload & verify status periodically with a prompt to update, for example.
I paid 0.99 for some 3rd party app to do that for me years ago. It still seems to work.
And I'll still need it because I doubt I'll be switching to 26 or 27 any time soon.
Edit: Pass2UWallet is the name of the app I'm using if anyone cares. I'm not getting a commission for that yadda yadda doo.
TFA is from a developer that created an app to create passes in iOS (and Android)
I'll have to see the workflow but I find it incredibly annoying to have tickets that you may or may not be able to put in the Wallet and maybe we'll send them to you a week before the event when you're traveling. Understand about airline checkins but keeping mental track of things like theater tickets or timed museum entries is really annoyinmg.
Who's to say the business that issued the ticket will accept your homemade imitation? with "adjustable styles, images, colors, and text fields"?
Absolutely no one whose job it is to scan barcodes gets paid enough to give a single fuck about how that barcode was created
Been using Pass2U for this for years.
Surely this was considered earlier within Apple. I wonder what changed that they decided to do this now.
Similarly I was using Pass4Wallet.
https://apps.apple.com/mw/app/pass4wallet-store-cards/id1423...
Makes you wonder why this wasn't always possible.. I go to lots of events that have qr codes on their tickets, this will be useful
For whatever reason apple required passes to be digitally signed with an apple developer certificate. On the other hand a screenshot/pdf is "good enough" that they didn't bother fixing it.
What is the difference between this and taking a picture/screenshot of the QR code?
Does just taking a pic of the QR code not work just as well?
You can double tap the lock button to open your wallet with all your passes. Also it automatically raises the brightness for QR passes to make it easier for readers.
You could do the same thing with shortcuts I guess but using the first class feature is nice.
It does, but then it's buried in your photos instead of on the home screen.
Most tickets don’t just come with a QR, it has other information like seating/metadata not in the QR that can only be captured in a photo.
Interesting. Do you have examples of such data or any pointers. I always take screenshots of the wallet pass and they seem to work fine.
Funny, when I take a picture of a ticket I can still see all those things.
they do the most obvious, sorely missing feature after over a decade of stubbornness and it goes straight to the top of HN
Pretty useful. I wish more places would allow this. My zoo membership makes you install their app just to enter.
I’ve always felt like Wallet is mostly a solution in search of a problem, but maybe more adoption will help?
I don’t really believe that places that require membership cards are going to let users start creating their own, though.
I think Wallet might be the most used feature for many on the iPhone, especially if they pay with their phone. What makes you think it's looking for a problem to solve?
I think Wallet is great and the adoption in certain areas like boarding passes is almost 100% and it beats digging through email to find some pdf and zooming in on some QR code when you have to present it (Hoping that your screen doesn't rotate in the worst possible moment). Also many big cities support it for public transport and most banking apps allow you to use your credit cards there for Apple Pay.
I guess I consider Apple Pay via Wallet, which I use, to be different from Gym Membership via Wallet, which just doesn't seem worth the effort? Maybe I'm unusual.
Agreed. I use it basically every day. It's almost disquieting how quickly Apple inserted itself into payments, but it's frankly safer than a credit card and the NFC(?) works much better.
Being able to have train/bus passes on my phone whenever I go to another country is nice. Some places are a pain in the ass because even different cities have their own systems and they're all given names like IBCJ or JGCUVFGIB as if anyone is supposed to figure how to look them up. And oftentimes physical passes can only be bought from machines in select areas. And when going to undeveloped areas (particularly Europe), the few machines that do exist are broken and look like they were abandoned years ago, leaving the only option to track down where some rail staff are and trying to find someone who won't just wave you away without even looking at your face and hoping they'll help get you a pass instead of needing to get annoying one time tickets. Then sometimes places just tell you to install an app to buy tickets. That app requires a local phone number and address to verify.
Apple wallet lets me install passes and charge them up without even being in the country that I'll be visiting yet. It makes things massively more tedious. I wish more European countries supported it, because as much as Europeans have some weird pride in their public transportation, they're more complicated and backwards than even the poorest Asian nations. Being able to add any pass to Apple wallet would be a huge step in resolving that.
The kid behind the counter at most places is neither paid nor trained enough to identify if the digital card in my phone’s wallet comes from their app or if I made it myself.
As long as it scans they don’t care.
I use Wallet purely to satisfy my collecting habit. I like to add movie tickets to it after purchasing them in the movie app, so I can look back at all the movies I've watched from many years ago until now.
Having boarding passes in Wallet which also update real time is so nice. Same thing with other tickets for events.
Yeah having gate, seat, time updating automatically is such a huge improvement for travel.
I still see people amazed when I pay for stuff with my Apple Watch. The only other place I know that reliably uses the Apple Watch with wallet outside of payment is Disney World, but the experience there was ok at best as I was managing my entire family and I'm pretty sure they would rather sell you multiple magic bands, but seeing as how phones will never get smaller I'd love more places to support tapping my watch on things.
Wallet is already plenty useful to me.
Ticketing is a great use-case for it, I have flight tickets, concerts/events tickets, airport bus tickets, if it keeps expanding to integrate with even more tickets (my local public transportation system, the express train to the airport, more venues) it will only become more useful.
Edit: also, all of my cards, I haven't used a physical card at POS terminals in years, they only get used on ATMs.
I don't really think of it as an app; I think of it as the "double-tap side button to do tap to pay or present my ticket" iPhone feature
Could someone explain what a "pass" is in this context?
Basically anywhere you need to scan a QR code to get in, you can have a pass in Apple Wallet. I’ve never stored payment info in Apple Wallet. But every time I take a flight, I store my boarding pass in Apple Wallet. It’s than printing a physical boarding pass, it automatically updates metadata (e.g., flight times, gates), and it’s nicer than just a picture.
Previously, you could only add passes if the company supported it. So most airlines have Apple Wallet passes, but most gyms don’t. This update will allow you to create your own passes. Basically just storing the QR codes (and maybe some metadata?) in one easy-to-use place on your phone. I can imagine this being convenient for daily use so you don’t have to track a gym tag with a QR code and a library tag with a QR code, etc. Also nice for tickets to events.
Entry ticket, basically. I went to Olympic Natl park recently and had the pass added to my Apple Wallet.
Been using Wallet Creator for that matter. Free and no ads.
https://apps.apple.com/app/id1486573384
Looks like someone got sherlocked [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)#Sherlocked...
You're right, but the blog author also seemed to be in the same position.
It's kind of nice that I can put my Safeway and Soopercard in there now, but that still means having to scan the barcode, and frankly it's less cumbersome to just hand my physical card to the cashier. The only store that seems to have figured out how to automatically add their card to NFC payments is Maverik gas stations.
What is a "pass"?
A generic name for a collection of things used to gain access to something.
That’s not really helping explain it, so here’s some examples:
Airplane tickets, library membership barcode, sports tickets, loyalty cards for your local coffee shop, conference tickets, etc.
Essentially anything with a barcode first and foremost. The website that this blog is about allows you to generate your own passes.
Now we just need the ability to add custom NFC/RFID passes in the Wallet app for workplace doors/lifts/etc.
Accessgrid is a startup in this space.
I hope that we will soon have ways to change the tone of AI writing, I hate that all news articles now have that same AI voice.
What is a "pass" in that context?
Finally, there's a website out there to do it but holy shit was it a pain