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.
> I have no way to add an alias or distinguish them otherwise.
Seeing ones own name on a physical card also doesn't say say which joint account it is, yours or your partners (my partner and I each have Bank X, and each have a card for the other, which only has our own name, so, I feel your pain).
But, there is a way!
1. Tap the card, then tap the card[123] icon upper right and "Enter physical card information".
2. Either scan the card or type it in. Add the CVV while you're at it, seeing this later requires an additional FaceID.
3. Add "Description" for "Mine" or "Joint" or whatever. (KEY STEP)
When asked if you want to replace the card with same number say yes. It'll stay the same card, same transaction histories, etc., but now have a distinguishing description.
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.
I didn't know I could do that, so I just gave it a try.
First instinct, double tap the side button to open Wallet. Couldn't rearrange the cards there. So,I opened Settings app and couldn't rearrange the cards there. Finally, I opened the Wallet app and found I could rearrange cards there, though there's no visual indicators that I can. I accidentally changed my default card on the first attempt.
> My banks provide different colour options for their cards.
I'd like to take a moment to appreciate a tiny "UX feature" that punches above its weight: When multiple physical cards have different base-colors to their plastic, visible along the edge.
This reduces how often you even need to check the face of a card. With several in one sleeve/stack, you can slide out the one you want, knowing that (for example) blue is credit, green is debit, red is the shared family one etc.
With my kind of wallet, if I had to pick I'd rather customize the edge-color versus the faces.
The only information sent to the card processor is the swipe (number expiration date) and sometimes the zip code and verification code on the back (if entered by hand).
When my wife worked retail (20+ years ago), she had to verify the name on the card with the name on the machine with the name on their ID. They caught a decent number where the machine had a different name pop up than the card showed. And WAY more when comparing both to their ID.
They called her "The Bulldog" because of how vigilant she was about it. That store lead the region in CC Fraud. But soon they were the bottom of the region in shrink and loss prevention.
I worked retail for a bit in high school. I tried to check card vs ID name for about a week before the manager told me to cut that shit out - too many wives, kids, etc using "dad's" card (this was 1994, so it was almost exclusively dad's card - I imagine that's changed in the last 30 years).
Requiring additional ID for low-value credit card transactions is not necessarily good security from a customer standpoint, as it increases exposure to identity theft by store employees to reduce the relatively minor risk of small, easily reversible fraudulent transactions.
At least in my experience the "name on the machine" back then was just read from the magstripe - I had access to a track 3 writer and had some fun copying my credit card info onto my driver license and swiping that.
> the "name on the machine" back then was just read from the magstripe.
It is (or was last time I played with card readers). But a person would sometimes use a stolen card with their name on the physical card so it matched their ID.
I guess people weren't updating it digitally? Maybe it was easier to just clone a card onto a card you already have?
> The only information sent to the card processor is the swipe (number expiration date) and sometimes the zip code and verification code on the back (if entered by hand).
For credit cards? No, that's not necessarily true.
Second; have you tried this with actual 80yr olds with early onset? Because I have. It doesn’t work, not even close. The steps require to get to that point are impossible for an 80yr old with early onset to even get close to. From trust, to setup, to even the stupid double-click with arthritic fingers, it’s fraught with roadblocks. And forget swiping.
This is a massive problem. The lack of care for options to equip seniors with usable iPhones is a massive problem right now. It is causing suffering both in the seniors and in the people who love them.
Thank you for bringing this up. I am 77 and techie through and through, but with several ios gadgets mostly on 26, it's a fright trying to swipe. The iphone SE3 has a home button. The Christmas sale ipad has a touch (raised) button. And nuttier than squirrel **, the volume buttons reverse up and down functions when you rotate the ipad. Some controls pull down. Some pull up.
And Apple+ wonder why people cling to older OS versions. It's not change so much as disorientation.
PS. I sharpie everything. Even with myopia, I can't read "best by" dates. It takes a powerful magnifier in addition to my macro lens eyes.(less the glasses) This is crazy. I sharpie the dates at home.
And a bit off-topic, only Trader Joe's provides big readable price labels. I need the phone camera to read prices elsewhere, even with the correct glass prescription. And ingredients? Fuggedaboutit.
UPC could be a starting point for fetching info, but nobody's starting.
Yeah. iPhone and iPad have gone backwards for my mother every year. Losing the home button was a disaster. Every edge swipe, or double-click is more trouble. The new stuff is great for me, but the original skeuomorphic designs were so much better for my mom.
Even as a non-80 year old (much closer to the first half than second), I don't understand what has been built or why I would care...
A piece of paper has infinite battery life and perfect UX (ignoring security for a second). I don't have to remember to add it to something and then worry if I added it, or how I can give it someone later...this idea of a pass you build doesn't seem to pass the "does it make sense" test.
I feel truly sorry for older folks navigating apps/logins/passwords/etc.
Their experience is often utter shit.
Two examples:
1. Often older folks have their screen zoom maxed out for readability. Extreme zoom will often place critical fields and buttons off-screen - making the app useless.
2. Fingers and hands of older folks often tremble. So imagine holding in your trembling left hand your phone, while you're trying to hit a target with your trembling right finger. All while standing in line to get a discount on your groceries.
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.
I can fully control the location of cards in my physical wallet.
The sorting of the Apple Wallet column is a mystery to me. I can probably control it. But I couldn’t tell you how. It also lacks tactile feel. So it’s just not the same. It’s a sloppy mess.
I don’t know about you but I can’t possibly remember what’s in every fold and pocket because most of the stuff is used infrequently but is still necessary to have on me (health insurance card, for instance).
I basically only know what’s in one or two places. I just end up rifling through everything until I find it
> 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.
One stupid button would solve all that. I'm of similar age as you and really miss buttons. In my car, on my devices, on appliances, etc. There are applications where capacitive touchscreen buttons make sense but by and large all they've done over the last 15 years or so is enshittify everything.
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.
> “The biggest UX issue Apple has for that persona isn't the wallet, it's the lack of physical home button”
So true! Also my 84 year old mother can never figure the difference between a web site and an app. If I could add a home button and solve the second issue her life would be much better.
You can put color labels on top of cards, so that they look distinct even in a typical physical wallet that only shows the top part of each card.
Or, say, Google Wallet shows you can the last 4 digits, and allows to name a card, so choosing between identical-looking cards of the same bank is easy (I do it regularly).
But Apple are not fans of letting the user customize things.
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.
And lack of a "back" button. Although they have sort of improved that with the little teeny tiny back arrow that sometimes appears in the upper left of the screen and is hard to click
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.
In my house we have two businesses [1][2] so that adds two cards. You may also have a card for medical expenses that can be reimbursed with a FSA/HSA or a prepaid debit card that you got as a gift, etc.
My bank does a slightly different cutout notch at the top of the card for credit card versus debit card. It is useful for orienting card when inserting into card readers (or cash machines).
Apple and Tesla are two companies that somehow have a widespread reputation for great UX that I think are absolutely atrocious in that area. It's not just 70 yearolds, an iphone is unusuable for someone of any age if they've never used one before and don't have someone to tell them how to do core actions like back or home.
Tesla loves to hide critical functionality in non-standard places, often buried in touch screen menus. They can move items at any time. That's insane to me, but I guess I'm the outlier.
Android's move to gestures is lame copycat behavior. I've actually seen people online defending it on the grounds that using gestures feels cooler. Maybe that explains it, many people will take UI gimmicks over solid usability.
Right, especially Tesla. The one thing I will say about Tesla's UI (not UX) is that for a while (and admittedly to this day, still, largely) it looked far better and pleasing than most auto UIs. But 1) others are catching up on that front, and 2) as you say, the UX is often garbage.
Some banks are better than others - Apple is amusingly bad at it if you have the Apple Card and your wife has you shared on hers. Two white rectangles, both alike in dignity, in fair Cupertino, where we lay our scene.
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.
As we more and more mandate smartphones to live, we need to take accessibility into account. Watching "the olds" (which we are all fated to become someday unless something intervenes) fight technology is eye-opening; especially when you realize that you are starting to fight it.
I never knew there was a virtual home button available in iOS; but apparently there is.
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.
Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. My debit card from my credit union is easy to map to the account as they share digits, but other debit cards from other institutions are completely unrelated.
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.
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
your current wallet lets you add labels or stickers to your cards.
classic Apple situation - look, this is super clean, intuitive software! but if you want a reasonable level of flexibility that you would expect elsewhere, you are SOL.
Wouldn't the app registering the card provide the card image? And actually cards from the same provider/app are suppose to occupy the same "vertical" slot but then show a horizontal dialog. Also, I bet even with the identical looking 20px preview, the actual order is consistent so just remember which is which - same interface physical cards provide.
Is there a reason to not pick a single card as your default payment card? I find it's pretty rare I need to pick a card manually unless it's a store card or card for specific spending type (resturants, gas, etc.)
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.
Switching your card when using Apply Pay as part of checkout on website was better when tapping the card icon allowed you to switch the card you are paying with but since iOS 26 that is for editing your billing address… if you want to change the card you have to select option below that with no icon titled “Other Cards & Pay Later Options”
Well, I don't know what it looks like in Apple Wallet, because I use Google Wallet, but for the same reason I'm struggling to imagine the problem because there the cards are pretty large – maybe ⅔ real card size on my Pixel 10 – and in a carousel at the top. So you can see clearly which one the active one is, and just swipe between them if it's not the one you want.
Easier than my physical wallet tbh, where they're behind each other, which I say begrudgingly because I've long held out, only starting to use the app a couple of weeks ago.
I like it. I don't really need 20 cards in my apple wallet, so I just don't ... I just keep what I need like my existing physical wallet (now smaller because of my apple wallet).
I have multiple Chase cards but they do look different from each other physically and in the Wallet app. Isn't that just a bank issue of not making cards differentiate from each other?
give me ability to write a damn whatever on the card. My bank provides USD, EUR and other currencies on different cards with exact same cover. Maddening.
I can imagine that we don't have this option just because people would put their PINs there, and maybe it's not exactly secure enough, but sprinkle some validation on top and we'd be ok.
Nothing like having every flight you ever booked continuously stored forever. So easy to say “gee this flight was three days ago, maybe they don’t need the boarding pass anymore”. I just checked and I somehow have a covid test from 2022 stuck in there.
Another related annoyance, and I’m not sure if this is Apples fault or the developer’s fault, but things like plane tickets don’t expire out. You don’t need to auto remove them (but perhaps give me the option to opt in for that) but slightly greying expired ones out in the ui by default would go a long way towards helping with this
Wait, what? Double-clicking will prompt for Face ID to open your default card for oayment, and from there you swipe down to see the stack — which I suppose is the screen you’re looking for.
But you cannot edit, add, or remove anything in this stack, and there's no way to go from it to the wallet. You have to close it, and open the actual wallet app which will show a slightly different view, and more items
This one seems harder to get right to me. The cards are stacked so that the card further down the screen is the top of the stack (the card overlap indicating which is in front of which). I would guess this was done because if you can only see part of the cards behind, seeing the top of the obscured card is more useful than seeing the bottom.
I could be missing something, but where there is no perfect solution, I want to be slower to say the option they chose is dumb.
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.
I've tried to come up with the reason they don't do it, and thought MAYBE they were afraid people would put PINs for the cards there and they thought it's a bad idea. I wonder why I even tried to invent a good reason for them, designers could just lack perspective and do not care at all, even in apple.
For all I know there is something like that, but it'll be buried in settings, probably in accessibility, where nobody ever goes.
Discoverability of options on the iPhone is fraught with danger and distrust, I learned about CarPlay widgets a few days ago and I've used it for years.
Apple's keyboards have keys marked delete or a symbol where other keyboards have keys marked backspace, delete, or a symbol. Their utility was the same in my experience. What obvious difference did I not see?
For a long time Apple had keyboards with only delete (delete the character at or in front of the cursor) and not backspace (delete the character before the cursor).
My 1st comment said Apple's keyboards have keys marked delete or a symbol where other keyboards have keys marked backspace, delete, or a symbol. And these keys had the same utility.
bombcar said some Apple keyboards had a delete key which did not delete the character before the cursor and not a key which deleted the character before the cursor.
The 1st page showed Apple's keyboards had keys marked delete or a symbol where other keyboards had keys marked backspace, delete, or a symbol. The 2nd page was disordered slop but said Apple keyboards' delete and other keyboards' backspace had the same function. The 3rd page said Apple keyboards had the key bombcar said not and not the key bombcar said they had.
Just demonstrates the ambiguity and confusion which Apple has created around basic text input with their "innovation" of keyboard design.
Some try to explain this as an effort to save precious space but this doesn't quite add up since they also added a whole row of superfluous and unique "junk" keys as shown in the first link straight from the source.
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.
This has existed since the first version, except it needs to be signed with a valid apple cert.
A .pkpass file is a zipped directory that has a json file and some assets. There's no need to have a more limited version, a pass is already very limited.
The issue is spoofing. Major event ticketers are unwilling to publish passes if there's nothing to stop someone else from publishing a pass that is indistinguishable from their's and thus is an avenue for fraud.
The difference with events is that an ics file is not something someone's going to try to sell you or that you'd want to buy. But anyway, all Apple would have to do is stop checking the signing.
This exists, .pkpass. You mostly don’t know about them because iOS tries to abstract away the file system, and because each one has to be code signed by a registered Apple Developer account.
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.
My guess is that the are requiring this in order to reduce the amount of fraud there (I am sure there still is some, but...). Apple really does not want to be involved when someone can't get into the Taylor Swift concert that they paid some scammer a lot of money for the Apple Wallet ticket they got.
Having an authenticated developer account at least provides some level of speed bump to scammers, and a better starting point for the police.
Excellent take. Had Apple made a dummy proof "Pass" portal for clubs, venues, etc to use to visually design and manage passes (and maybe even distribute?) when they launched this, I think it would have exploded, and the ecosystem lock in would have just been all that much deeper. But Apple doesn't really think or operate like that.
Be really interesting to see how their approach evolves over the next couple years with sea changes happening all around them in this moment.
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.
Pass2U is neat because you can make somewhat arbitrary "Cards" with it. Cards with nice layouts that include QR code, images, titles, text, whatever. I have a card for my drone license, insurance, medical, and a few others. Super handy. It would be neat if they allowed that level of customization in the wallet app itself, but this is Apple.
These apps never worked for me at my gym. The app successfully (it seemed) scanned my barcode on my gym card, but the gym's scanner never was able to pick it up from my phone's screen at max brightness, adjusting zoom etc.
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.
Some time ago I built a really simple app to do this as well, called PeekCard[1]. But I actually hope Apple Wallet does it better. What I'm wondering about is whether there will be decent barcode support and if it will support widgets.
FYI you can add description text to a photo in the (default) Photos app. Just swipe up and there should be a text box. You can (usually) find a photos based on what you've written
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.
> 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?
I switched to Android for a year last year and moving back to iOS was really painful. A lot of things make so much more sense in Android. I really miss being able to manage notifications granularly directly from the notifications for example, or quickly copy/paste many previous things from my clipboard directly from the keyboard, but what I miss the most is the AI integration, using AI is so painful on iOS
I made the mistake of switching to an iPhone 17 from an S24. The phone had a problem so I thought why not try the famous UX of iOS? I had issues but I found the solution.
I barely look at notifications anymore, it’s useless, does not group by app, can’t take any actions from there. Even if you open the app, the notification remains, so it’s just clutter at this point.
Clipboard does not exist.
Chrome sometimes when opened, opens up the address bar and there is no close button, I need to navigate away from the page I was on, or refresh. So I switched to safari, good job google.
The biggest annoyance would be the back button or rather the lack of it. Every app does it somewhere different. It could be a left swipe in some apps, a back button on top left, a tick box on top right. There is no mental model you can rely on.
Then I realized I am using it wrong. iPhones were never made for people like you or me. We just wants to finish our work as soon as possible. We zoom through multiple apps and get things done. iOS is for toddlers/old people and technologically challenged crowd. We need to think like them.
So I treat the notification shade just like other users, glance and ignore. No need to manage it or clear it.
Clipboard are needed when you copy multiple things. That’s because you want to paste multiple things. You are trying to do too much at the same time. Think of the most “simplest” person you know, they wouldn’t do what you’re doing. So I stopped doing that.
Back button was only an annoyance when I either used non-apple apps or do things fast. Again doing things fast is not what your simple friend would do. They would take time and each action, press, swipe would be deliberate, not careful yet confused.
Basically stop trying to be a smart person while using an iPhone. You might be a wizard in front of a terminal. iOS is designed for a large and specific set of audience and I truly respect Apple for catering to them. Most corporations like Google or Microsoft will try to teach their users and make them something they are not. Apple accepts them as they are.
This comment has a lot of grammar mistakes which I am frankly not going to fix. The apple keyboard is terrible to go in between words and sentences to edit them. But the target audience would never do it anyway and Apple proudly supports their decision by not improving the keyboard. I think that’s a noble thing to do.
You should know, however you're laying out the header on your website, in Safari it renders your face comically stretched and giant. Both on desktop and iPhone.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Amazing Apple. Taking decades to release the most basic features that everyone has been asking for/missing ever since the underlying product came out. If they present that feature as “revolutionary”, I win the apple keynote bingo again.
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.
Unfortunately, they're not even good at it. Setting up a custom CI chain today as a brand-new member of the Apple Developer program, I found out that they have at least 9 different certificates to generate with no explanation which one you need on the page, and after I had generated one, downloaded it, and imported it into the keychain, the certificate was invalid. I additionally had to go to some cryptic looking page[1] and manually download the "right" in intermediary 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.
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.
And literally (at least in the correct meaning of the term) I just spent 30 minutes trying to get a theater ticket into my wallet from my computer and was able to do so only after I switched to my phone. I'll make a printout anyway which would probably work if push came to shove in spite of what the email says. But I just don't love that you're fsckd if something happens to your phone. As I said in another message. I'll probably buy another phone sooner than I would have otherwise just so I have a reasonably contemporary packup.
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.
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.
Definitely need this - I have a grocery store app with an embedded QR code linked to my account for discounts at point of sale. Opening the app is slow - so I've screen shotted the QR code. I have to pull my pinned photos at checkout to scan the code. This is also slow - but less slow than opening the app.
Looking forward to adding it to Apple wallet.
As an aside, does the Jenny number still work at most stores?
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'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.
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.
There are many anittrust arguments that can be taken up against Apple, but I don't see how this is one of them. They're adding a feature to add a QR/bar code to the wallet app. It's a very minor feature.
As for sherlocking, this is such a minor use case that I'm not sure why anyone (minus maybe the initial app developers) would be upset. As a user, I need one less app to do something (that I should've been able to do for years). It's not like they're stripping an ability away from developers to hide it behind their own gates.
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.
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.
It works fine if scanned by a machine though (ticket gate, self checkout etc.)
I've used a third party app for this for a UK weekly pass train ticket you could only buy physically, but if you buy it on a train rather than at a station they can't print you a ticket with a magnetic strip and they have to give you one with a barcode (technically an Aztec code), which you can then scan onto your phone and use at the gate. But I kept the original ticket with me too and would use that if a person asked to inspect it
If you have an Apple Card they already assume that you have an iPhone to tap to pay with. Why pay for hardware in the card that duplicates hardware your phone already does better?
(Better as in Phone tap to pay has an extra layer of security that card tap to pay does not. But also yes, cynically, better for Apple because Apple gets a small cut in Phone tap to pay to help pay for that extra layer of security.)
Using an Apple Watch for tap to pay is really nice, for what it is worth.
Handing your phone to the guy working the gate at the parking lot is awkward. Will he need to hand it back and forth for face ID? Handing a credit card like everyone else does is better, but why is this heavy titanium card one of the few that doesn’t work on his tap reader as expected?
I wear a garmin when I work out but otherwise want a mechanical watch with no tracking or distractions.
In the modern world, the guy working the gate at the parking lot should be handing you the reader and not care what thing you are swiping, inserting, or waving at it. I think Europe gets it. America is slowly catching up.
But if you have to pass a card because some business still feels that they have to touch your cards in this age, the EMV chip on the titanium card is just fine. They should just insert the card after a second or two of wondering why it doesn't tap. If their reader only takes tap to pay, then their reader needs to placed in a more convenient place for you to tap things like your phone or able to be passed to you for you to do what you need to do to pay.
No one should be physically handling my payment method anymore but me. It's not a great service to walk 20 feet away from me with my credit card just to make a payment at some hard to reach terminal. In fact it's a security risk for skimming and card stealing (and always has been).
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.
Part of it is why carry a physical wallet anymore when your phone (and Apple Watch) can store all of your cards? There are even US States now that let you store your Driver's License in Apple Wallet. (And a version of Digital ID based on a US Passport that works for TSA and sometimes but not always US Customs.) There's an increased ability to leave the house just carrying your phone and not a physical wallet.
In a gym context specifically: a lot of gym wear doesn't have pockets. Being able to leave your phone and physical wallet at home or in a locker and use your watch (which you also use for workout tracking) for every membership card swipe, vending machine electrolyte/protein drink purchase, and gym class ticket can be very convenient.
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 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 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.
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.
God I hope that's included. As silly as it sounds, having NFC inside passes require a custom entitlement/approval from Apple was my breaking point for ditching iOS development altogether. The form for requesting said entitlement was broken (at the time, at least), and I didn't understand why .pkpass files had to be signed at all - I still don't.
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?
And thus the trap closes shut. Big money wants to control all your identities. This is basically it, it's the final stage. now all it takes is a government that stops obeying fundamental rights... oh wait!
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.
> I have no way to add an alias or distinguish them otherwise.
Seeing ones own name on a physical card also doesn't say say which joint account it is, yours or your partners (my partner and I each have Bank X, and each have a card for the other, which only has our own name, so, I feel your pain).
But, there is a way!
1. Tap the card, then tap the card[123] icon upper right and "Enter physical card information".
2. Either scan the card or type it in. Add the CVV while you're at it, seeing this later requires an additional FaceID.
3. Add "Description" for "Mine" or "Joint" or whatever. (KEY STEP)
When asked if you want to replace the card with same number say yes. It'll stay the same card, same transaction histories, etc., but now have a distinguishing description.
which is much better than nothing, but is a fairly recent addition
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.
...so you keep the one you primarily use in the front of your card slot in your wallet, and the one you don't use often behind your other cards.
Apple wallet solves this in a similar way, letting you arrange the order
I didn't know I could do that, so I just gave it a try.
First instinct, double tap the side button to open Wallet. Couldn't rearrange the cards there. So,I opened Settings app and couldn't rearrange the cards there. Finally, I opened the Wallet app and found I could rearrange cards there, though there's no visual indicators that I can. I accidentally changed my default card on the first attempt.
The fact that the double-click shortcut opens the Wallet app in a functionally limited but visually identical mode is terrible UI design.
On the other hand, I’d hate to accidentally rearrange my cards while trying to party with an alternate one.
Yes, I can try to memorize the order of the cards. What a lousy workaround, and absolutely no reason to defend poor UI design.
> My banks provide different colour options for their cards.
I'd like to take a moment to appreciate a tiny "UX feature" that punches above its weight: When multiple physical cards have different base-colors to their plastic, visible along the edge.
This reduces how often you even need to check the face of a card. With several in one sleeve/stack, you can slide out the one you want, knowing that (for example) blue is credit, green is debit, red is the shared family one etc.
With my kind of wallet, if I had to pick I'd rather customize the edge-color versus the faces.
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.
The only information sent to the card processor is the swipe (number expiration date) and sometimes the zip code and verification code on the back (if entered by hand).
When my wife worked retail (20+ years ago), she had to verify the name on the card with the name on the machine with the name on their ID. They caught a decent number where the machine had a different name pop up than the card showed. And WAY more when comparing both to their ID.
They called her "The Bulldog" because of how vigilant she was about it. That store lead the region in CC Fraud. But soon they were the bottom of the region in shrink and loss prevention.
I worked retail for a bit in high school. I tried to check card vs ID name for about a week before the manager told me to cut that shit out - too many wives, kids, etc using "dad's" card (this was 1994, so it was almost exclusively dad's card - I imagine that's changed in the last 30 years).
Requiring additional ID for low-value credit card transactions is not necessarily good security from a customer standpoint, as it increases exposure to identity theft by store employees to reduce the relatively minor risk of small, easily reversible fraudulent transactions.
Is a card present transaction generally "easily reversible"?
At least in my experience the "name on the machine" back then was just read from the magstripe - I had access to a track 3 writer and had some fun copying my credit card info onto my driver license and swiping that.
> the "name on the machine" back then was just read from the magstripe.
It is (or was last time I played with card readers). But a person would sometimes use a stolen card with their name on the physical card so it matched their ID.
I guess people weren't updating it digitally? Maybe it was easier to just clone a card onto a card you already have?
> The only information sent to the card processor is the swipe (number expiration date) and sometimes the zip code and verification code on the back (if entered by hand).
For credit cards? No, that's not necessarily true.
I use physical stickers on my cards to tell them apart
First; have you heard of a sharpie?
Second; have you tried this with actual 80yr olds with early onset? Because I have. It doesn’t work, not even close. The steps require to get to that point are impossible for an 80yr old with early onset to even get close to. From trust, to setup, to even the stupid double-click with arthritic fingers, it’s fraught with roadblocks. And forget swiping.
This is a massive problem. The lack of care for options to equip seniors with usable iPhones is a massive problem right now. It is causing suffering both in the seniors and in the people who love them.
Thank you for bringing this up. I am 77 and techie through and through, but with several ios gadgets mostly on 26, it's a fright trying to swipe. The iphone SE3 has a home button. The Christmas sale ipad has a touch (raised) button. And nuttier than squirrel **, the volume buttons reverse up and down functions when you rotate the ipad. Some controls pull down. Some pull up.
And Apple+ wonder why people cling to older OS versions. It's not change so much as disorientation.
PS. I sharpie everything. Even with myopia, I can't read "best by" dates. It takes a powerful magnifier in addition to my macro lens eyes.(less the glasses) This is crazy. I sharpie the dates at home.
And a bit off-topic, only Trader Joe's provides big readable price labels. I need the phone camera to read prices elsewhere, even with the correct glass prescription. And ingredients? Fuggedaboutit.
UPC could be a starting point for fetching info, but nobody's starting.
Yeah. iPhone and iPad have gone backwards for my mother every year. Losing the home button was a disaster. Every edge swipe, or double-click is more trouble. The new stuff is great for me, but the original skeuomorphic designs were so much better for my mom.
Even as a non-80 year old (much closer to the first half than second), I don't understand what has been built or why I would care...
A piece of paper has infinite battery life and perfect UX (ignoring security for a second). I don't have to remember to add it to something and then worry if I added it, or how I can give it someone later...this idea of a pass you build doesn't seem to pass the "does it make sense" test.
I feel truly sorry for older folks navigating apps/logins/passwords/etc.
Their experience is often utter shit.
Two examples:
1. Often older folks have their screen zoom maxed out for readability. Extreme zoom will often place critical fields and buttons off-screen - making the app useless.
2. Fingers and hands of older folks often tremble. So imagine holding in your trembling left hand your phone, while you're trying to hit a target with your trembling right finger. All while standing in line to get a discount on your groceries.
Because technology is about promotions and shareholders, and not about the USERS of the technology.
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.
Two columns vertically, but four columns deep in 3D space.
I can fully control the location of cards in my physical wallet.
The sorting of the Apple Wallet column is a mystery to me. I can probably control it. But I couldn’t tell you how. It also lacks tactile feel. So it’s just not the same. It’s a sloppy mess.
Without wading into your leather vs glass debate: open the Wallet app, press and hold a card, drag up and down as desired.
I don’t know about you but I can’t possibly remember what’s in every fold and pocket because most of the stuff is used infrequently but is still necessary to have on me (health insurance card, for instance).
I basically only know what’s in one or two places. I just end up rifling through everything until I find it
> 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.
Also, fine motor coordination often declines with age. Can make it hard to do a swipe or hit a key reliably in the first try.
I still like my physical keyboards - bring back sliders !
One stupid button would solve all that. I'm of similar age as you and really miss buttons. In my car, on my devices, on appliances, etc. There are applications where capacitive touchscreen buttons make sense but by and large all they've done over the last 15 years or so is enshittify everything.
> 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.
Yes, exactly. Or some simple text to overlay at the top of the card, it's a very easy problem to solve as far as I can tell.
> 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.
It wasn’t obvious where to add a virtual home button, so I’m adding instructions here:
Settings > Accessibility > Touch > Assistive Touch
I put a small piece of tape over my gym card since wife has identical one. Freedom of customization
> “The biggest UX issue Apple has for that persona isn't the wallet, it's the lack of physical home button”
So true! Also my 84 year old mother can never figure the difference between a web site and an app. If I could add a home button and solve the second issue her life would be much better.
You can put color labels on top of cards, so that they look distinct even in a typical physical wallet that only shows the top part of each card.
Or, say, Google Wallet shows you can the last 4 digits, and allows to name a card, so choosing between identical-looking cards of the same bank is easy (I do it regularly).
But Apple are not fans of letting the user customize things.
> The same is true in a physical card wallet.
Except that I can mark the actual cards in some way... plastic labels work perfectly fine on credit/debit cards.
>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...
And lack of a "back" button. Although they have sort of improved that with the little teeny tiny back arrow that sometimes appears in the upper left of the screen and is hard to click
You can draw or write on a physical card, or add a scratch etc.
The Apple thing where you can switch cards is a weird interface too, even after you have done it a few times.
> The same is true in a physical card wallet.
That’s why Apple has to copy the problem for the wallet?
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.
In my house we have two businesses [1][2] so that adds two cards. You may also have a card for medical expenses that can be reimbursed with a FSA/HSA or a prepaid debit card that you got as a gift, etc.
[1] don't tell Mr. Fox he's running a business
[2] ... and will probably be adding a third
Some banks have their debit and credit cards almost identical.
You may have multiple cards from the same bank (personal, family, business).
Different cash back from the same bank making you want to use one card over another.
My bank does a slightly different cutout notch at the top of the card for credit card versus debit card. It is useful for orienting card when inserting into card readers (or cash machines).
Apparently an accessibility thing and maybe a wider standard than Mastercard. See image of cards near top of https://www.mastercard.com.au/en-au/personal/find-a-card/tou...
ID, Medicare card, HSA card, SSA benefits card, 401k/pension card, debit card, credit card, AAA card, and that assumes he only has one of each!
So? Computers are the dream machine, we should strive to do better than physical reality, not mimic it.
Apple and Tesla are two companies that somehow have a widespread reputation for great UX that I think are absolutely atrocious in that area. It's not just 70 yearolds, an iphone is unusuable for someone of any age if they've never used one before and don't have someone to tell them how to do core actions like back or home.
Tesla loves to hide critical functionality in non-standard places, often buried in touch screen menus. They can move items at any time. That's insane to me, but I guess I'm the outlier.
Android's move to gestures is lame copycat behavior. I've actually seen people online defending it on the grounds that using gestures feels cooler. Maybe that explains it, many people will take UI gimmicks over solid usability.
Right, especially Tesla. The one thing I will say about Tesla's UI (not UX) is that for a while (and admittedly to this day, still, largely) it looked far better and pleasing than most auto UIs. But 1) others are catching up on that front, and 2) as you say, the UX is often garbage.
Except that personalized cards have been a thing since I've had a card in 2014...
If you have multiple cards with the same bank you'll need to remember the last 4 digits. It's total bs
My Amex cards show up like the physical ones with the actual physical design elements like colors etc… so maybe it’s bank dependent?
Some banks are better than others - Apple is amusingly bad at it if you have the Apple Card and your wife has you shared on hers. Two white rectangles, both alike in dignity, in fair Cupertino, where we lay our scene.
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.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.[1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
As we more and more mandate smartphones to live, we need to take accessibility into account. Watching "the olds" (which we are all fated to become someday unless something intervenes) fight technology is eye-opening; especially when you realize that you are starting to fight it.
I never knew there was a virtual home button available in iOS; but apparently there is.
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.
Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. My debit card from my credit union is easy to map to the account as they share digits, but other debit cards from other institutions are completely unrelated.
This whole comment section looks to be turning into a "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Credit Cards" blog post.
Yes, that's the problem.
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.
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.
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...
your current wallet lets you add labels or stickers to your cards.
classic Apple situation - look, this is super clean, intuitive software! but if you want a reasonable level of flexibility that you would expect elsewhere, you are SOL.
Wouldn't the app registering the card provide the card image? And actually cards from the same provider/app are suppose to occupy the same "vertical" slot but then show a horizontal dialog. Also, I bet even with the identical looking 20px preview, the actual order is consistent so just remember which is which - same interface physical cards provide.
Is there a reason to not pick a single card as your default payment card? I find it's pretty rare I need to pick a card manually unless it's a store card or card for specific spending type (resturants, gas, etc.)
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.
Yep! Extremely annoying when traveling with my family of four!
Switching your card when using Apply Pay as part of checkout on website was better when tapping the card icon allowed you to switch the card you are paying with but since iOS 26 that is for editing your billing address… if you want to change the card you have to select option below that with no icon titled “Other Cards & Pay Later Options”
Speaking of that, sometimes I touch the card I want and it doesn't select it. I go through this dance of touch, wait, touch, wait, repeat. Insane.
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?
Well, I don't know what it looks like in Apple Wallet, because I use Google Wallet, but for the same reason I'm struggling to imagine the problem because there the cards are pretty large – maybe ⅔ real card size on my Pixel 10 – and in a carousel at the top. So you can see clearly which one the active one is, and just swipe between them if it's not the one you want.
Easier than my physical wallet tbh, where they're behind each other, which I say begrudgingly because I've long held out, only starting to use the app a couple of weeks ago.
I like it. I don't really need 20 cards in my apple wallet, so I just don't ... I just keep what I need like my existing physical wallet (now smaller because of my apple wallet).
apple is a masterclass of terrible uis and hidden interactions
I have multiple Chase cards but they do look different from each other physically and in the Wallet app. Isn't that just a bank issue of not making cards differentiate from each other?
give me ability to write a damn whatever on the card. My bank provides USD, EUR and other currencies on different cards with exact same cover. Maddening.
I can imagine that we don't have this option just because people would put their PINs there, and maybe it's not exactly secure enough, but sprinkle some validation on top and we'd be ok.
Nothing like having every flight you ever booked continuously stored forever. So easy to say “gee this flight was three days ago, maybe they don’t need the boarding pass anymore”. I just checked and I somehow have a covid test from 2022 stuck in there.
Another related annoyance, and I’m not sure if this is Apples fault or the developer’s fault, but things like plane tickets don’t expire out. You don’t need to auto remove them (but perhaps give me the option to opt in for that) but slightly greying expired ones out in the ui by default would go a long way towards helping with this
You can order them in whatever order you want and set your main one as the default.
good for you and your particular bank.
There's also no way to go to the wallet from the actual shortcut screen you most commonly use (the double-click power one)
Wait, what? Double-clicking will prompt for Face ID to open your default card for oayment, and from there you swipe down to see the stack — which I suppose is the screen you’re looking for.
But you cannot edit, add, or remove anything in this stack, and there's no way to go from it to the wallet. You have to close it, and open the actual wallet app which will show a slightly different view, and more items
long hold to re-arrange your rearrange what your default card is - but to the bottom of the stack - is dumb
Apple has my location at every moment of my life, from birth to natural death, and they can't switch the default card based on the store I'm in?
Will wonders never cease.
It works aggressively in Walgreen's
This one seems harder to get right to me. The cards are stacked so that the card further down the screen is the top of the stack (the card overlap indicating which is in front of which). I would guess this was done because if you can only see part of the cards behind, seeing the top of the obscured card is more useful than seeing the bottom.
I could be missing something, but where there is no perfect solution, I want to be slower to say the option they chose is dumb.
> shared account with your partner
Do stupid things and the UI looks stupid. Shocker.
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.
just enough to visually distinguish two otherwise visually similar cards.
How about a simple, old fashioned text label for each card?
I've tried to come up with the reason they don't do it, and thought MAYBE they were afraid people would put PINs for the cards there and they thought it's a bad idea. I wonder why I even tried to invent a good reason for them, designers could just lack perspective and do not care at all, even in apple.
Why would you save the PIN? It’s not required when doing Wallet transactions - it uses Face ID or similar.
For all I know there is something like that, but it'll be buried in settings, probably in accessibility, where nobody ever goes.
Discoverability of options on the iPhone is fraught with danger and distrust, I learned about CarPlay widgets a few days ago and I've used it for years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rUminiQjtM
From my limited experience, Apple often denies the obvious for the sake of asthetics.
For example, the simple utility of a [Backspace] key.
Apple's keyboards have keys marked delete or a symbol where other keyboards have keys marked backspace, delete, or a symbol. Their utility was the same in my experience. What obvious difference did I not see?
For a long time Apple had keyboards with only delete (delete the character at or in front of the cursor) and not backspace (delete the character before the cursor).
I saw or heard this never. This was when?
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/mxcl3ll/a/magic-keyboard-...
https://pfeiffertheface.com/why-is-there-no-backspace-key-on...
https://www.macworld.com/article/672671/how-to-forward-delet...
My 1st comment said Apple's keyboards have keys marked delete or a symbol where other keyboards have keys marked backspace, delete, or a symbol. And these keys had the same utility.
bombcar said some Apple keyboards had a delete key which did not delete the character before the cursor and not a key which deleted the character before the cursor.
The 1st page showed Apple's keyboards had keys marked delete or a symbol where other keyboards had keys marked backspace, delete, or a symbol. The 2nd page was disordered slop but said Apple keyboards' delete and other keyboards' backspace had the same function. The 3rd page said Apple keyboards had the key bombcar said not and not the key bombcar said they had.
The Apple confusion started much, MUCH earlier - see https://68kmla.org/bb/threads/backspace-vs-delete-a-topic-on...
Just demonstrates the ambiguity and confusion which Apple has created around basic text input with their "innovation" of keyboard design.
Some try to explain this as an effort to save precious space but this doesn't quite add up since they also added a whole row of superfluous and unique "junk" keys as shown in the first link straight from the source.
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
This has existed since the first version, except it needs to be signed with a valid apple cert.
A .pkpass file is a zipped directory that has a json file and some assets. There's no need to have a more limited version, a pass is already very limited.
The issue is spoofing. Major event ticketers are unwilling to publish passes if there's nothing to stop someone else from publishing a pass that is indistinguishable from their's and thus is an avenue for fraud.
The difference with events is that an ics file is not something someone's going to try to sell you or that you'd want to buy. But anyway, all Apple would have to do is stop checking the signing.
This exists, .pkpass. You mostly don’t know about them because iOS tries to abstract away the file system, and because each one has to be code signed by a registered Apple Developer account.
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.
My guess is that the are requiring this in order to reduce the amount of fraud there (I am sure there still is some, but...). Apple really does not want to be involved when someone can't get into the Taylor Swift concert that they paid some scammer a lot of money for the Apple Wallet ticket they got.
Having an authenticated developer account at least provides some level of speed bump to scammers, and a better starting point for the police.
As alluded to in the ancestor comment, signing the .pkpass requires an Apple developer account.
Excellent take. Had Apple made a dummy proof "Pass" portal for clubs, venues, etc to use to visually design and manage passes (and maybe even distribute?) when they launched this, I think it would have exploded, and the ecosystem lock in would have just been all that much deeper. But Apple doesn't really think or operate like that.
Be really interesting to see how their approach evolves over the next couple years with sea changes happening all around them in this moment.
Yes, what a bizarre framing! Surely it should read "It took 14 years for Apple to realise the problem was with them".
https://apps.apple.com/de/app/pass4wallet-store-cards/id1423...
It seems more to me that they never provided proper third party integration to basically create a pkpass file encompassing
- a QR code embedding arbitrary text up to, say, 128B or something, usually ASCII characters and usually a ticket ID and/or URL
- 1-2 lines of supplementary "clear text"
- a logo and/or fancy color gradient if needed
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.
Pass2U is neat because you can make somewhat arbitrary "Cards" with it. Cards with nice layouts that include QR code, images, titles, text, whatever. I have a card for my drone license, insurance, medical, and a few others. Super handy. It would be neat if they allowed that level of customization in the wallet app itself, but this is Apple.
These apps never worked for me at my gym. The app successfully (it seemed) scanned my barcode on my gym card, but the gym's scanner never was able to pick it up from my phone's screen at max brightness, adjusting zoom etc.
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.
Pass4Wallet seems dead. The developer website
https://girappe.com/ is also dead
Bummer. Welp, still works for now. I'm sure there are very similar apps as well.
I am also a happy user. Came here to say the same thing.
Some time ago I built a really simple app to do this as well, called PeekCard[1]. But I actually hope Apple Wallet does it better. What I'm wondering about is whether there will be decent barcode support and if it will support widgets.
[1]: https://apps.apple.com/app/peekcard/id6749822787
FYI you can add description text to a photo in the (default) Photos app. Just swipe up and there should be a text box. You can (usually) find a photos based on what you've written
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.
Photos on Google has a Document image recognition category too. <3
Check https://apps.apple.com/nl/app/pass4wallet-store-cards/id1423...
Just get https://supercardsapp.com/ and be done with it. It's most likely way better than the new Apple Wallet
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.
> 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.
I switched to Android for a year last year and moving back to iOS was really painful. A lot of things make so much more sense in Android. I really miss being able to manage notifications granularly directly from the notifications for example, or quickly copy/paste many previous things from my clipboard directly from the keyboard, but what I miss the most is the AI integration, using AI is so painful on iOS
What made you move back to iOS?
I made the mistake of switching to an iPhone 17 from an S24. The phone had a problem so I thought why not try the famous UX of iOS? I had issues but I found the solution.
I barely look at notifications anymore, it’s useless, does not group by app, can’t take any actions from there. Even if you open the app, the notification remains, so it’s just clutter at this point.
Clipboard does not exist.
Chrome sometimes when opened, opens up the address bar and there is no close button, I need to navigate away from the page I was on, or refresh. So I switched to safari, good job google.
The biggest annoyance would be the back button or rather the lack of it. Every app does it somewhere different. It could be a left swipe in some apps, a back button on top left, a tick box on top right. There is no mental model you can rely on.
Then I realized I am using it wrong. iPhones were never made for people like you or me. We just wants to finish our work as soon as possible. We zoom through multiple apps and get things done. iOS is for toddlers/old people and technologically challenged crowd. We need to think like them.
So I treat the notification shade just like other users, glance and ignore. No need to manage it or clear it.
Clipboard are needed when you copy multiple things. That’s because you want to paste multiple things. You are trying to do too much at the same time. Think of the most “simplest” person you know, they wouldn’t do what you’re doing. So I stopped doing that.
Back button was only an annoyance when I either used non-apple apps or do things fast. Again doing things fast is not what your simple friend would do. They would take time and each action, press, swipe would be deliberate, not careful yet confused.
Basically stop trying to be a smart person while using an iPhone. You might be a wizard in front of a terminal. iOS is designed for a large and specific set of audience and I truly respect Apple for catering to them. Most corporations like Google or Microsoft will try to teach their users and make them something they are not. Apple accepts them as they are.
This comment has a lot of grammar mistakes which I am frankly not going to fix. The apple keyboard is terrible to go in between words and sentences to edit them. But the target audience would never do it anyway and Apple proudly supports their decision by not improving the keyboard. I think that’s a noble thing to do.
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!
You should know, however you're laying out the header on your website, in Safari it renders your face comically stretched and giant. Both on desktop and iPhone.
Went through your site, and amazed to see you worked on Kingdom ? Loved that game a ton.
I miss this design ascetic.
If not for anything, the icon looks good.
Although it is not out yet, Garbage Country's art direction looks good :) wishlisted.
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.
Probably intentional. Train companies do loads of shenanigans with tickets and pricing
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?
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.
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.
That’s why Google can’t announce a new feature.
> 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.
From the blog
It’s crazy how many people refuse to use Android in the US
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
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.
Amazing Apple. Taking decades to release the most basic features that everyone has been asking for/missing ever since the underlying product came out. If they present that feature as “revolutionary”, I win the apple keynote bingo again.
I need this without knowing before that I needed this. Makes me question why this wasn’t implemented years ago. Anyway, great.
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.
Unfortunately, they're not even good at it. Setting up a custom CI chain today as a brand-new member of the Apple Developer program, I found out that they have at least 9 different certificates to generate with no explanation which one you need on the page, and after I had generated one, downloaded it, and imported it into the keychain, the certificate was invalid. I additionally had to go to some cryptic looking page[1] and manually download the "right" in intermediary certificates.
[1] https://www.apple.com/certificateauthority/
Coming from Android this was a big pain point
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.
Apple wallet proactively shows your event pass when it's time. Much better than trying to find the photo from your camera roll
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.
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.
I was thinking about this app. Couldn't recall the name
This is wonderful, I’ve been waiting for this to add a library card to Apple Wallet. I hope it will support linear barcodes too.
I am surprised nobody mentioned pass3wallet yet?
https://apps.apple.com/nl/app/pass4wallet-store-cards/id1423...
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.
In addition to the sibling comment: I really dislike opening my Photos app in front of other people.
And literally (at least in the correct meaning of the term) I just spent 30 minutes trying to get a theater ticket into my wallet from my computer and was able to do so only after I switched to my phone. I'll make a printout anyway which would probably work if push came to shove in spite of what the email says. But I just don't love that you're fsckd if something happens to your phone. As I said in another message. I'll probably buy another phone sooner than I would have otherwise just so I have a reasonably contemporary packup.
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.
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.
Definitely need this - I have a grocery store app with an embedded QR code linked to my account for discounts at point of sale. Opening the app is slow - so I've screen shotted the QR code. I have to pull my pinned photos at checkout to scan the code. This is also slow - but less slow than opening the app.
Looking forward to adding it to Apple wallet.
As an aside, does the Jenny number still work at most stores?
Apple needs to go a step beyond this and optionally automatically pick the best card to use based on your location to get the max cash back.
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'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.
This reminds me of WalletWallet [1], posted few months ago on HN [2].
[1] https://walletwallet.alen.ro/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46345745
That’s because, as the article explicitly states, this post is by walletwallet’s developer
can't believe I missed that...
Its a blog post from the WalletWallet team about the upcoming changes that have only been reported by Bloomberg news
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...
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.
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 :)
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.
There are many anittrust arguments that can be taken up against Apple, but I don't see how this is one of them. They're adding a feature to add a QR/bar code to the wallet app. It's a very minor feature.
As for sherlocking, this is such a minor use case that I'm not sure why anyone (minus maybe the initial app developers) would be upset. As a user, I need one less app to do something (that I should've been able to do for years). It's not like they're stripping an ability away from developers to hide it behind their own gates.
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.
Built a version of this for companies that want to move keys to Apple Wallet: accessgrid.com
Fingers crossed they'll finally add Code 39 barcode generation.
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.
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.
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.
Will this work only with scannable codes? Or with NFC as well?
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
There's some places like railroads that I've seen care about this so that people don't share tickets (like monthly pass types)
I use Pass4Wallet for several loyalty/gym memberships.
In my experience, if the code scans, the code scans.
It works fine if scanned by a machine though (ticket gate, self checkout etc.)
I've used a third party app for this for a UK weekly pass train ticket you could only buy physically, but if you buy it on a train rather than at a station they can't print you a ticket with a magnetic strip and they have to give you one with a barcode (technically an Aztec code), which you can then scan onto your phone and use at the gate. But I kept the original ticket with me too and would use that if a person asked to inspect it
Pretty useful. I wish more places would allow this. My zoo membership makes you install their app just to enter.
As long as we're innovating, how about adding tap to pay to the physical apple cards?
If you have an Apple Card they already assume that you have an iPhone to tap to pay with. Why pay for hardware in the card that duplicates hardware your phone already does better?
(Better as in Phone tap to pay has an extra layer of security that card tap to pay does not. But also yes, cynically, better for Apple because Apple gets a small cut in Phone tap to pay to help pay for that extra layer of security.)
Using an Apple Watch for tap to pay is really nice, for what it is worth.
Handing your phone to the guy working the gate at the parking lot is awkward. Will he need to hand it back and forth for face ID? Handing a credit card like everyone else does is better, but why is this heavy titanium card one of the few that doesn’t work on his tap reader as expected?
I wear a garmin when I work out but otherwise want a mechanical watch with no tracking or distractions.
In the modern world, the guy working the gate at the parking lot should be handing you the reader and not care what thing you are swiping, inserting, or waving at it. I think Europe gets it. America is slowly catching up.
But if you have to pass a card because some business still feels that they have to touch your cards in this age, the EMV chip on the titanium card is just fine. They should just insert the card after a second or two of wondering why it doesn't tap. If their reader only takes tap to pay, then their reader needs to placed in a more convenient place for you to tap things like your phone or able to be passed to you for you to do what you need to do to pay.
No one should be physically handling my payment method anymore but me. It's not a great service to walk 20 feet away from me with my credit card just to make a payment at some hard to reach terminal. In fact it's a security risk for skimming and card stealing (and always has been).
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.
Part of it is why carry a physical wallet anymore when your phone (and Apple Watch) can store all of your cards? There are even US States now that let you store your Driver's License in Apple Wallet. (And a version of Digital ID based on a US Passport that works for TSA and sometimes but not always US Customs.) There's an increased ability to leave the house just carrying your phone and not a physical wallet.
In a gym context specifically: a lot of gym wear doesn't have pockets. Being able to leave your phone and physical wallet at home or in a locker and use your watch (which you also use for workout tracking) for every membership card swipe, vending machine electrolyte/protein drink purchase, and gym class ticket can be very convenient.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
they do the most obvious, sorely missing feature after over a decade of stubbornness and it goes straight to the top of HN
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.
Imagine if they let us make and share apps too.
The amount of creativity and innovation the App Store has stifled is surely enormous and downright sad.
Awesome, finally. I don’t know why they wait so long to add things.
What is a "pass" in that context?
I think it means a digital copy of a ticket or similar card.
And yet there's still credit cards that don't support Apple Wallet. Looking at you Citi Best Buy card...
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.
Now we just need the ability to add custom NFC/RFID passes in the Wallet app for workplace doors/lifts/etc.
God I hope that's included. As silly as it sounds, having NFC inside passes require a custom entitlement/approval from Apple was my breaking point for ditching iOS development altogether. The form for requesting said entitlement was broken (at the time, at least), and I didn't understand why .pkpass files had to be signed at all - I still don't.
Same here - Why are they gating the NFC? There could be a sprawling ecosystem, instead they stifle it !
"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.
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.
Finally, there's a website out there to do it but holy shit was it a pain
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?
And thus the trap closes shut. Big money wants to control all your identities. This is basically it, it's the final stage. now all it takes is a government that stops obeying fundamental rights... oh wait!