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.
An 80 year old with early onset challenges can work this wallet, pick a card, and then hold the phone to the reader at a store. It's all co-opting "familiar" actions for them, not tech-like, which means they can do it.
The biggest UX issue Apple has for that persona isn't the wallet, it's the lack of physical home button. Everyone in their 70s and up seems to be given pause every time they aren't on the screen they expect, and even to unlock it.
Invisible affordances rely on memory rather than sight trigger: not good.
In my physical wallet, those identical looking cards have different names on them, ie. <myfirstname mylastname> and <mylastname - partnerslastname> for joint accounts. I can also mark them up with a marker, or request a different picture from some banks.
In iOS I need to remember that the one ending with 0044 is mine, and 0073 is for our joint account. I have no way to add an alias or distinguish them otherwise. This is ridiculous.
My banks provide different colour options for their cards. All my digital cards differ, even from the same bank. The alternate colours helps within the banks/ apps as well as within Wallet, so it's not just an iOS "workaround".
I agree, it would be nice if Apple added stickers, but the problem isn't, IMO, as bad as you make out.
Exceptions include transport and concert tickets. Most of the time this doesn't cause problems because I'm standing with the other people I'm travelling/gigging with, and the agent scanning the tickets doesn't care about any names on them.
> but the problem isn't, IMO, as bad as you make out.
But it is exactly as bad as they describe it. My bank doesn't provide color options for my cards, and there is no way to distinguish my two cards aside from the displayed four digits.
Isn't the same true of the wallet on iPhone? I drag and drop reorder my cards as necessary. There's a fixed number of positions that fit above the "fold" (in the scrolling sense).
No. I have only a vertical ordering available in Apple wallet. A card can be above another card or below another card. I have 3d physicality in a wallet that Apple wallet does not replicate.
> The biggest UX issue Apple has for that persona isn't the wallet, it's the lack of physical home button.
I'm in my 40s and don't have much trouble with reaching Home by swiping up from the bottom. But anecdotally, when I observe a person who is 65+ operate their iPhones, 9 times out of 10 they experience problems swiping up from bottom to reach Home. The swipe up does nothing, presumably because they aren't starting the swipe from low enough on the screen.
The hands of older people are also just literally less compatible with a capacitive touchscreen, because skin retains less moisture as we age. If you've ever seen an older person licking their finger before turning the page of a book, that's why.
You can use the Accessibility settings to add a virtual home button that's always displayed in the same place on-screen. That seems to work pretty well for the older folks I know.
What does an 80 year old (or anyone really) need with more than one or two cards on a daily basis where this would be an issue? Not being flippant; I legit want to know what leads to this. I have multiple cards but there's only one I use 99% of the time, and it's pink so it stands out.
> What does an 80 year old (or anyone really) need with more than one or two cards on a daily basis where this would be an issue?
In my physical wallet I can take the card I use daily (which is on a limited account and no big deal if I lose it) and leave the others at home. On my phone, there are all the cards I ever used or plan to use at some point in the future.
To that end, I do wish there was a way to hide some cards in wallet inside a "folder" or something. As is, they're there front and center, or not added at all.
I'm not 80 but do have a backup credit card and debit card and I do travel. So it's not so much "daily basis" but I do have a handful of cards that I keep with me.
If only a digital UI didn't have the same skeuomorpic limitations a physical card has ...oh wait!
(And it's not true that the same issue is true in a physical card wallet. In a physical card, either you get a different design from the bank, or you can trivially write on it with a marker or add a sticker to differentiate it).
>An 80 year old with early onset challenges can work this wallet, pick a card, and then hold the phone to the reader at a store.
A, yes, the standard target group for iOS and the Wallet app in particular.
This is silly. "It matches a 70 year old's muscle memory" should not be the sole test of good design; if it were, then we would be plugging mouses and keyboards into our phones.
First thing I noticed too, as I have multiple cards from the same bank. I also noticed they show you last digits of the ... CARD number, not the account number which would be tremendously more helpful. But I figured out you can put little icons on the cards. Which my bank did automatically for my business account. I added a little person icon for my personal account. Maybe bank specific though but definitely super dumb that you cannot label them yourself easily in the wallet app.
Spot on re: App UI designed and engineered by 20y/o in SF. That is actually accurate, because that was (is?) the team that engineered it. I interviewed with them sometime ago when Apple Pay had just come out, and that entire Wallet/Passbook team seemed really toxic and ... very mediocre. Not surprising that this feature hasn't seen much improvement over time.
This has been one of my peeves for years. Apple is capable of good design, and overall is well regarded for it, but there are a number of places where they have blinders on and absolutely refuse to fix extremely obvious missteps.
You say good. I'd call it minimal. Minimal doesn't mean good.
For example, I have bold text, larger text. On my mac I have all these contrast increasing settings enabled, simply because it's *not* good "design"
It's good that it's minimal, but this minimalism is also why many things don't work (timemachine, icloud files/photos -> everything needs to be automatic, causing recurring downloads follewed cache eviction of those files). Etc etc etc
I'm 39M and have ended up with a bunch of different credit cards; I get annoyed picking between them even without the additional complication of them being identical in appearance.
For me it's my daily driver, my Costco branded card, my airline's amex card, my USD denominated card, and my work-issued card. There are also two ATM/debit cards in there which I'll occasionally choose at small merchants where I know the CC fees hit them harder.
In most cases I just want the daily driver, but the airline card gets good rewards for dining so it does come out reasonably often as well. The USD card I can mostly ignore unless I'm traveling there and can temporarily set it as the default.
Open the Wallet app (the double-tap-power view doesn’t work). Ask to delete one card at a time (which requires two taps which a short mandatory wait between them due to the animation). Tap again to confirm. Then wait an obnoxiously long time for the too-cute animation to complete. Then repeat for the next card, while wondering why there is no bulk remove operation of any sort.
In my case, I have a personal card and a shared card from the same bank. The card type is the same, one just happens to have my spouse as a co-owner.
Some banks do allow you to pick a card look/image. Most don't.
But whatever the case, Apple really should allow tagging cards in the Wallet with a small icon/emoji/something. It doesn't need to be fancy - just enough to visually distinguish two otherwise visually similar cards.
While the author does mention the barriers to adoption, the premise— Apple was waiting for people to do something, but people weren’t doing it— subtly casts Apple as a passive entity in this scenario. The solution seems to be presented as Apple stepping in to make up for Developers’ inaction. If it’s been 14 years and there’s been very little adoption, this is clearly a UX problem. How many small venues or libraries have developers, let alone developers that do enough Apple-specific development work to have an Apple Developer account? In 14 years they couldn’t come up with an alternate solution? Maybe a less expensive administrative version of a developer account? It’s not users jobs to sell themselves on Apple’s products.
What there really should be is a wallet equivalent of an ics file. It doesn't need to support everything, static images would be enough for most use cases. Advanced features could then require the current model.
But that would require collaboration, and standards, which seem to have gone away as smart phones came in.
W3C Verifiable Credentials [1] does almost exactly what you suggested and was recently approved as a top-level W3C standard. Adoption has been sluggish outside of digital identity (with Android [2] and the EU digital identity wallet being notable exceptions), but I think it is because the family of standards is relatively new.
The problem is that those are treated almost like an app, you need a $99/year developer certificate to publish them.
Many third party ticketing solutions venues and events use do support this, but for instance if you want to sell tickets for a party and self-host, you need another external integration, or a developer account. Generating a PDF with a QR code, and publishing an .ics file is essentially free.
> 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?
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'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.
Pass2U Wallet works great, but like many apps, it really should just be a feature to begin with.
The weird thing is that this was a feature when Wallet was first introduced. You could create a URL that would add a pass to a wallet. There were web sites that helped out with it. I still have some of the passes I created this way a decade or more ago.
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.
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…
> An option to override automatic (un)archival of passes is also desperately needed.
PREACH. If you buy an open return (any time within 30 days of outward), Avanti set the expiry on both wallet passes to be the outward day. Which means your "valid for 30 days" ticket disappears almost immediately. Absolute shambles.
Oh great, Apple is sherlocking yet another category of apps (and not to mention Apple always had a convoluted and gatekeepy approach to letting passes show up in the Wallet app)
I guess there is no appetite for “antitrust” in the US right now.
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.)
Location-based functionality like this is already widespread in iOS; I'd be surprised if it wasn't supported. Reminders and calendar events (and PassKit!) already have it, for example.
Good to see Apple catching up with Google finally.
Google wallet has had the abillity to scan tickets and create custom passes for years.
This article frames it like Apple are coming to save the day from lazy developers, but in reality its Apple who have been sleeping on this while other competing services have offered it for some time now.
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.
> For whatever reason apple required passes to be digitally signed with an apple developer certificate
Apple uses every opportunity to try to increase developer and user lock in. This was no exception. I see this new move as begrudgingly opening the doors to all as not enough people were signing with Apple Developer Certificates.
QR code definitely in focus, lighting good, the screen will brighten automatically for maximum contrast, and it will be in an easy-to-find location (especially handy if location services knows you are near where you need the pass and suggests it automatically).
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.
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.
Finally!¹ My biggest use case is not actually creating passes for services which don’t provide them, but being able to create passes without having to install a freaking app.
FlixBus (I might be misremembering) is the only service I ever found which lets you pay with Apple Pay and add a pass to Wallet all from Safari. For airlines and other bus/train services I always have to install the app to do both. Maybe this will allow me to buy tickets on the web then make my own pass.
It feels wrong to say something nice about Ticketmaster, but you don't need their app to add concert tickets to Apple Wallet (at least at all the venues where I live). I strictly use their website because I don't trust them.
I've never tried to pay with Apple Pay on ticketmaster.com, but I assume I could do that as well.
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.
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.
This rules, I hope they don't botch it. All I need is the ability to save a custom image, maybe with an optional expiration date. Then I could add all my insurance cards and concert tickets that are not already compatible.
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.
Adding your own passes was possible before (I used websites to create passes on 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?
> Could people snatch a QR code on my paper ticket
That's a feature, not a bug. It means you can sell the ticket if you can't make it. Thankfully (/s) we have Ticketmaster with rolling codes now, so, no reselling.
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.
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.
I basically only fly one airline. But I generally try to store train passes, airline tickets, show tickets, etc. in the wallet when I can especially if I can't easily print a backup print copy--which is often an effort if I'm traveling.
What's the difference here between adding the "custom pass" and just taking a photo of QR code? Just the fact that it is stored in Wallet instead of photos folder?
It's stored in Wallet so you can access it through the Wallet shortcut (double-press power button), when you open it the screen automatically brightens, and it's a perfectly clear QR code rather than a picture so it'll be easier to scan.
This is for storing tickets issued by other people.
It's handy because it provides an organizational tool. Airplane tickets are in wallet, concert tickets are in wallet. Maybe ferry passes and store discount ids should be too.
And also because you get better results from scanning a regenerated 2d/3d barcode after decoding the original vs scanning a photo of the original.
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.
I don't like carrying physical cards around for every little thing. To me carrying a gym card around is way more effort than storing a QR code on the phone.
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.
In NYC they had issues with the temporary card numbers they give. Apple got special privileges compared to Google wallet, where they were treating the tapping double charging being rejected as erroneous and banning the cards.
I had to switch to a physical card and the MTA advice was to get an iphone
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.
It's not seamless but a lot of people seem to be like "do your research" and install 8 different apps if you're traveling to a bunch of cities. And, yeah, anything that decreases the friction is good. I maybe know how to deal with transit without doing real research in a handful of cities but anything that decreases friction seems good.
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.
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.
And, meanwhile, I want to have a physical card/printout I can use if something goes wrong with phone/watch.
Don't get me wrong, I do appreciate the apps on my electronic devices but I also carry paper copies whenever I can because electronic stuff breaks in various ways.
Me too, I wouldn't only rely on electronic devices for something as essential as paying. I still carry my cards in my physical wallet with me, it's just that I haven't had the need to use them in a very long time.
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 don't know about most used app. But it seems a useful backup for specific vendor/site-specific apps when traveling for a variety of reasons. It gives me a ticket for a specific purpose on my phone when I may not be in a position to print one out--which many people don't do these days for misguided reasons anyway.
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.
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.
Sure, if you carry the physical card. But that's exactly what I get from having it on the phone -- I don't want an inch-thick wallet from times of old, I want to carry as little as possible. I have a tiny magsafe wallet with ID, one physical credit card, and an airtag card. Everything else lives on the phone.
I think I'd be satisfied enough allowing me not to add credit card to the Apple Wallet, putting away the push from the prime place some way. Or not to have a huge promotion being in the first place when opening it with a 'Get' buttopn being the only one on it.
Today's app makers do not respect users. See them as big milk-cow fan-base, that's it! So they can piss off, I don't care about them either!
I feel like a broken record to be saying this again, but seeing Claude's writing everywhere grates. Maybe I'm preaching to the choir, but can we at least post articles that weren't so obviously Claude?
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.
The same is true in a physical card wallet.
An 80 year old with early onset challenges can work this wallet, pick a card, and then hold the phone to the reader at a store. It's all co-opting "familiar" actions for them, not tech-like, which means they can do it.
The biggest UX issue Apple has for that persona isn't the wallet, it's the lack of physical home button. Everyone in their 70s and up seems to be given pause every time they aren't on the screen they expect, and even to unlock it.
Invisible affordances rely on memory rather than sight trigger: not good.
> The same is true in a physical card wallet.
Not at all.
In my physical wallet, those identical looking cards have different names on them, ie. <myfirstname mylastname> and <mylastname - partnerslastname> for joint accounts. I can also mark them up with a marker, or request a different picture from some banks.
In iOS I need to remember that the one ending with 0044 is mine, and 0073 is for our joint account. I have no way to add an alias or distinguish them otherwise. This is ridiculous.
My banks provide different colour options for their cards. All my digital cards differ, even from the same bank. The alternate colours helps within the banks/ apps as well as within Wallet, so it's not just an iOS "workaround".
I agree, it would be nice if Apple added stickers, but the problem isn't, IMO, as bad as you make out.
Exceptions include transport and concert tickets. Most of the time this doesn't cause problems because I'm standing with the other people I'm travelling/gigging with, and the agent scanning the tickets doesn't care about any names on them.
> but the problem isn't, IMO, as bad as you make out.
But it is exactly as bad as they describe it. My bank doesn't provide color options for my cards, and there is no way to distinguish my two cards aside from the displayed four digits.
That's not universally true.
I have a shared checking account with my spouse. Both my personal card and shared card are the same, save for the actual card number.
Same here. I'm in the US. I actually thought Credit/Debit cards had to have YOUR "full" name on them.
My wife and I share MANY accounts, and none of our cards have a "shared" name on it.
But it’s not true of a physical wallet. I have 8 locations in my bi-fold wallet I can place any given card, orientation-wise.
Lower left, lower right, upper left, upper right, inside left, inside right, dollar bills left, dollar bills right.
Isn't the same true of the wallet on iPhone? I drag and drop reorder my cards as necessary. There's a fixed number of positions that fit above the "fold" (in the scrolling sense).
No. I have only a vertical ordering available in Apple wallet. A card can be above another card or below another card. I have 3d physicality in a wallet that Apple wallet does not replicate.
Ah, so two+ columns vs one.
> The biggest UX issue Apple has for that persona isn't the wallet, it's the lack of physical home button.
I'm in my 40s and don't have much trouble with reaching Home by swiping up from the bottom. But anecdotally, when I observe a person who is 65+ operate their iPhones, 9 times out of 10 they experience problems swiping up from bottom to reach Home. The swipe up does nothing, presumably because they aren't starting the swipe from low enough on the screen.
The hands of older people are also just literally less compatible with a capacitive touchscreen, because skin retains less moisture as we age. If you've ever seen an older person licking their finger before turning the page of a book, that's why.
> The same is true in a physical card wallet.
You can markup a card in a physical wallet. And then originally identical cards become visually distinguishable.
Riffing on your comment: would be neat if Apple let you add a sticker to the corner of each card.
> the lack of physical home button
You can use the Accessibility settings to add a virtual home button that's always displayed in the same place on-screen. That seems to work pretty well for the older folks I know.
I put a small piece of tape over my gym card since wife has identical one. Freedom of customization
What does an 80 year old (or anyone really) need with more than one or two cards on a daily basis where this would be an issue? Not being flippant; I legit want to know what leads to this. I have multiple cards but there's only one I use 99% of the time, and it's pink so it stands out.
> What does an 80 year old (or anyone really) need with more than one or two cards on a daily basis where this would be an issue?
In my physical wallet I can take the card I use daily (which is on a limited account and no big deal if I lose it) and leave the others at home. On my phone, there are all the cards I ever used or plan to use at some point in the future.
To that end, I do wish there was a way to hide some cards in wallet inside a "folder" or something. As is, they're there front and center, or not added at all.
I'm not 80 but do have a backup credit card and debit card and I do travel. So it's not so much "daily basis" but I do have a handful of cards that I keep with me.
If you have multiple cards with the same bank you'll need to remember the last 4 digits. It's total bs
>The same is true in a physical card wallet.
If only a digital UI didn't have the same skeuomorpic limitations a physical card has ...oh wait!
(And it's not true that the same issue is true in a physical card wallet. In a physical card, either you get a different design from the bank, or you can trivially write on it with a marker or add a sticker to differentiate it).
>An 80 year old with early onset challenges can work this wallet, pick a card, and then hold the phone to the reader at a store.
A, yes, the standard target group for iOS and the Wallet app in particular.
I swear, the arguments people make...
So? Computers are the dream machine, we should strive to do better than physical reality, not mimic it.
Except that personalized cards have been a thing since I've had a card in 2014...
This is silly. "It matches a 70 year old's muscle memory" should not be the sole test of good design; if it were, then we would be plugging mouses and keyboards into our phones.
First thing I noticed too, as I have multiple cards from the same bank. I also noticed they show you last digits of the ... CARD number, not the account number which would be tremendously more helpful. But I figured out you can put little icons on the cards. Which my bank did automatically for my business account. I added a little person icon for my personal account. Maybe bank specific though but definitely super dumb that you cannot label them yourself easily in the wallet app.
That's ridiculous. The card number has nothing to do with the account number.
The design is skeuomorphic, modeled after a standard bifold wallet which gives your physical cards the same treatment.
My current wallet doesn't give me any affordances: https://grifiti.com/products/grifiti-band-joes-3-25-x-1-25-i...
Spot on re: App UI designed and engineered by 20y/o in SF. That is actually accurate, because that was (is?) the team that engineered it. I interviewed with them sometime ago when Apple Pay had just come out, and that entire Wallet/Passbook team seemed really toxic and ... very mediocre. Not surprising that this feature hasn't seen much improvement over time.
This has been one of my peeves for years. Apple is capable of good design, and overall is well regarded for it, but there are a number of places where they have blinders on and absolutely refuse to fix extremely obvious missteps.
You say good. I'd call it minimal. Minimal doesn't mean good.
For example, I have bold text, larger text. On my mac I have all these contrast increasing settings enabled, simply because it's *not* good "design"
It's good that it's minimal, but this minimalism is also why many things don't work (timemachine, icloud files/photos -> everything needs to be automatic, causing recurring downloads follewed cache eviction of those files). Etc etc etc
Apple is capable of beautiful and minimalistic designs, but their usability has been terrible since basically the iPod.
Minimal is often an enemy of usable.
I'm 39M and have ended up with a bunch of different credit cards; I get annoyed picking between them even without the additional complication of them being identical in appearance.
For me it's my daily driver, my Costco branded card, my airline's amex card, my USD denominated card, and my work-issued card. There are also two ATM/debit cards in there which I'll occasionally choose at small merchants where I know the CC fees hit them harder.
In most cases I just want the daily driver, but the airline card gets good rewards for dining so it does come out reasonably often as well. The USD card I can mostly ignore unless I'm traveling there and can temporarily set it as the default.
When I first started using it I thought something was broken
Which something? The identical-ness of your particular collection of cards, in the wallet?
The flow for removing cards is also a fantastic exercise in slowness.
How so?
Open the Wallet app (the double-tap-power view doesn’t work). Ask to delete one card at a time (which requires two taps which a short mandatory wait between them due to the animation). Tap again to confirm. Then wait an obnoxiously long time for the too-cute animation to complete. Then repeat for the next card, while wondering why there is no bulk remove operation of any sort.
Why doesn’t the bank design a slightly different top for different cards?
Because the cards aren't different cards.
In my case, I have a personal card and a shared card from the same bank. The card type is the same, one just happens to have my spouse as a co-owner.
Some banks do allow you to pick a card look/image. Most don't.
But whatever the case, Apple really should allow tagging cards in the Wallet with a small icon/emoji/something. It doesn't need to be fancy - just enough to visually distinguish two otherwise visually similar cards.
There's also no way to go to the wallet from the actual shortcut screen you most commonly use (the double-click power one)
apple is a masterclass of terrible uis and hidden interactions
long hold to re-arrange your rearrange what your default card is - but to the bottom of the stack - is dumb
While the author does mention the barriers to adoption, the premise— Apple was waiting for people to do something, but people weren’t doing it— subtly casts Apple as a passive entity in this scenario. The solution seems to be presented as Apple stepping in to make up for Developers’ inaction. If it’s been 14 years and there’s been very little adoption, this is clearly a UX problem. How many small venues or libraries have developers, let alone developers that do enough Apple-specific development work to have an Apple Developer account? In 14 years they couldn’t come up with an alternate solution? Maybe a less expensive administrative version of a developer account? It’s not users jobs to sell themselves on Apple’s products.
What there really should be is a wallet equivalent of an ics file. It doesn't need to support everything, static images would be enough for most use cases. Advanced features could then require the current model.
But that would require collaboration, and standards, which seem to have gone away as smart phones came in.
W3C Verifiable Credentials [1] does almost exactly what you suggested and was recently approved as a top-level W3C standard. Adoption has been sluggish outside of digital identity (with Android [2] and the EU digital identity wallet being notable exceptions), but I think it is because the family of standards is relatively new.
[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-overview/
[2] https://developer.android.com/identity/digital-credentials
Apple has .pkpass
The problem is that those are treated almost like an app, you need a $99/year developer certificate to publish them.
Many third party ticketing solutions venues and events use do support this, but for instance if you want to sell tickets for a party and self-host, you need another external integration, or a developer account. Generating a PDF with a QR code, and publishing an .ics file is essentially free.
As alluded to in the ancestor comment, signing the .pkpass requires an Apple developer account.
Yes, what a bizarre framing! Surely it should read "It took 14 years for Apple to realise the problem was with them".
15 years ago, a friend of mine built an app to do this — "Pass Creator" — then Apple yanked the functionality.
He paid me to create the icon for it, which was my first paid graphic design job: https://www.noio.nl/2012/10/pass-creator-app-icon/
Thanks Paul.. good times!
> 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?
Yep. Lots of things are supported:
https://support.google.com/wallet/answer/12060038
Anything with a bar code or QR code will work. It's not complicated.
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.
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.
Pass2U Wallet works great, but like many apps, it really should just be a feature to begin with.
The weird thing is that this was a feature when Wallet was first introduced. You could create a URL that would add a pass to a wallet. There were web sites that helped out with it. I still have some of the passes I created this way a decade or more ago.
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.
Just get https://supercardsapp.com/ and be done with it. It's most likely way better than the new Apple Wallet
I've got a Photos album called Keys.
Photos on Google has a Document image recognition category too. <3
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 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…
> An option to override automatic (un)archival of passes is also desperately needed.
PREACH. If you buy an open return (any time within 30 days of outward), Avanti set the expiry on both wallet passes to be the outward day. Which means your "valid for 30 days" ticket disappears almost immediately. Absolute shambles.
Wallet → … → Expired → Edit → Select All → Eyeball (!) → Unhide.
Doesn't help with the "automatic" part, but I try to remember to do this every few months.
This is for unhiding, but do you know of a way to do the reverse?
Oh great, Apple is sherlocking yet another category of apps (and not to mention Apple always had a convoluted and gatekeepy approach to letting passes show up in the Wallet app)
I guess there is no appetite for “antitrust” in the US right now.
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.
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)?
That one's real fun if you happen to be near the train station a lot, and have an anytime return ticket.
Yeah I had to turn that off when I lived near the train station.
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.)
Location-based functionality like this is already widespread in iOS; I'd be surprised if it wasn't supported. Reminders and calendar events (and PassKit!) already have it, for example.
I'm a fan of Wallet Creator (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wallet-creator/id1486573384)
Zero dollars, lets you geofence passes when you create them.
I need this without knowing before that I needed this. Makes me question why this wasn’t implemented years ago. Anyway, great.
Good to see Apple catching up with Google finally.
Google wallet has had the abillity to scan tickets and create custom passes for years.
This article frames it like Apple are coming to save the day from lazy developers, but in reality its Apple who have been sleeping on this while other competing services have offered it for some time now.
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.
> For whatever reason apple required passes to be digitally signed with an apple developer certificate
Apple uses every opportunity to try to increase developer and user lock in. This was no exception. I see this new move as begrudgingly opening the doors to all as not enough people were signing with Apple Developer Certificates.
What is the difference between this and taking a picture/screenshot of the QR code?
QR code definitely in focus, lighting good, the screen will brighten automatically for maximum contrast, and it will be in an easy-to-find location (especially handy if location services knows you are near where you need the pass and suggests it automatically).
Not much, it just allows you to save it in your wallet app instead of your photo app.
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.
Funny, when I take a picture of a ticket I can still see all those things.
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.
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
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.
Finally!¹ My biggest use case is not actually creating passes for services which don’t provide them, but being able to create passes without having to install a freaking app.
FlixBus (I might be misremembering) is the only service I ever found which lets you pay with Apple Pay and add a pass to Wallet all from Safari. For airlines and other bus/train services I always have to install the app to do both. Maybe this will allow me to buy tickets on the web then make my own pass.
¹ Assuming I even update to iOS 27, though.
It feels wrong to say something nice about Ticketmaster, but you don't need their app to add concert tickets to Apple Wallet (at least at all the venues where I live). I strictly use their website because I don't trust them.
I've never tried to pay with Apple Pay on ticketmaster.com, but I assume I could do that as well.
Will this work only with scannable codes? Or with NFC as well?
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.
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.
This rules, I hope they don't botch it. All I need is the ability to save a custom image, maybe with an optional expiration date. Then I could add all my insurance cards and concert tickets that are not already compatible.
Fingers crossed they'll finally add Code 39 barcode generation.
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.
Adding your own passes was possible before (I used websites to create passes on 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?
> Could people snatch a QR code on my paper ticket
That's a feature, not a bug. It means you can sell the ticket if you can't make it. Thankfully (/s) we have Ticketmaster with rolling codes now, so, no reselling.
> It means you can sell the ticket
This also means I can do it twice if I choose so.
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.
How do they get your paper ticket?
By using their smart glasses or 20x zoom camera to take a picture of it when I take it out of the pocket at a grocery line?
Thieves could snatch my paper ticket from my hands before, but at least in that situation I would be aware of it.
As long as we're innovating, how about adding tap to pay to the physical apple cards?
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)
Not the only app though :)
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.
Probably someone famous and powerful saw somebody do it on an Android phone and complained to someone high up in Apple.
Similarly I was using Pass4Wallet.
https://apps.apple.com/mw/app/pass4wallet-store-cards/id1423...
Who's to say the business that issued the ticket will accept your homemade imitation? with "adjustable styles, images, colors, and text fields"?
I use Pass4Wallet for several loyalty/gym memberships.
In my experience, if the code scans, the code scans.
Absolutely no one whose job it is to scan barcodes gets paid enough to give a single fuck about how that barcode was created
There's some places like railroads that I've seen care about this so that people don't share tickets (like monthly pass types)
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.
I basically only fly one airline. But I generally try to store train passes, airline tickets, show tickets, etc. in the wallet when I can especially if I can't easily print a backup print copy--which is often an effort if I'm traveling.
Entry ticket, basically. I went to Olympic Natl park recently and had the pass added to my Apple Wallet.
What's the difference here between adding the "custom pass" and just taking a photo of QR code? Just the fact that it is stored in Wallet instead of photos folder?
It's stored in Wallet so you can access it through the Wallet shortcut (double-press power button), when you open it the screen automatically brightens, and it's a perfectly clear QR code rather than a picture so it'll be easier to scan.
Pretty useful. I wish more places would allow this. My zoo membership makes you install their app just to enter.
Damn; PassWallet just got Sherlocked.
Google wallet has done this from day one. If Apple had done the same these 3rd party apps would have never existed in the first place.
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.
I literally don't get what this new feature is adding or why it would be part of an iPhone wallet.
If you want to issue tickets is your wallet the most obvious place to do it from? Why would an airline issue tickets from an iPhone?
Or, if this is just for storing tickets issued by other people, why does it benefit from going into the wallet app?
This is for storing tickets issued by other people.
It's handy because it provides an organizational tool. Airplane tickets are in wallet, concert tickets are in wallet. Maybe ferry passes and store discount ids should be too.
And also because you get better results from scanning a regenerated 2d/3d barcode after decoding the original vs scanning a photo of the original.
Can I use this feature to generate an airplane ticket? :P
I think "create" is the confusing part. It should be "digitize" or something. Either this, or "pass" means something else here.
they do the most obvious, sorely missing feature after over a decade of stubbornness and it goes straight to the top of HN
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.
I don't like carrying physical cards around for every little thing. To me carrying a gym card around is way more effort than storing a QR code on the phone.
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.
In NYC they had issues with the temporary card numbers they give. Apple got special privileges compared to Google wallet, where they were treating the tapping double charging being rejected as erroneous and banning the cards.
I had to switch to a physical card and the MTA advice was to get an iphone
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.
It's not seamless but a lot of people seem to be like "do your research" and install 8 different apps if you're traveling to a bunch of cities. And, yeah, anything that decreases the friction is good. I maybe know how to deal with transit without doing real research in a handful of cities but anything that decreases friction seems good.
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.
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.
And, meanwhile, I want to have a physical card/printout I can use if something goes wrong with phone/watch.
Don't get me wrong, I do appreciate the apps on my electronic devices but I also carry paper copies whenever I can because electronic stuff breaks in various ways.
Me too, I wouldn't only rely on electronic devices for something as essential as paying. I still carry my cards in my physical wallet with me, it's just that I haven't had the need to use them in a very long time.
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 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 don't know about most used app. But it seems a useful backup for specific vendor/site-specific apps when traveling for a variety of reasons. It gives me a ticket for a specific purpose on my phone when I may not be in a position to print one out--which many people don't do these days for misguided reasons anyway.
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.
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
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.
> my physical card
Sure, if you carry the physical card. But that's exactly what I get from having it on the phone -- I don't want an inch-thick wallet from times of old, I want to carry as little as possible. I have a tiny magsafe wallet with ID, one physical credit card, and an airtag card. Everything else lives on the phone.
Walgreens let’s you add your loyalty card and use both it and payment from Wallet.
What is a "pass" in that context?
I think it means a digital copy of a ticket or similar card.
This is AI slop blogspam. Original article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-04/ios-27-fe...
Perhaps comments can be moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48012532
You're getting downvoted, but it's unmistakably written by AI.
Now we just need the ability to add custom NFC/RFID passes in the Wallet app for workplace doors/lifts/etc.
"Clone this pass" as a service!
I would love to see that. No more forgetting the office RFID card
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.
I think I'd be satisfied enough allowing me not to add credit card to the Apple Wallet, putting away the push from the prime place some way. Or not to have a huge promotion being in the first place when opening it with a 'Get' buttopn being the only one on it.
Today's app makers do not respect users. See them as big milk-cow fan-base, that's it! So they can piss off, I don't care about them either!
Finally, there's a website out there to do it but holy shit was it a pain
I feel like a broken record to be saying this again, but seeing Claude's writing everywhere grates. Maybe I'm preaching to the choir, but can we at least post articles that weren't so obviously Claude?