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Discussion (221 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
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 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.
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.
Lower left, lower right, upper left, upper right, inside left, inside right, dollar bills left, dollar bills right.
I basically only know what’s in one or two places. I just end up rifling through everything until I find it
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.
You can markup a card in a physical wallet. And then originally identical cards become visually distinguishable.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That’s why Apple has to copy the problem for the 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...
I never knew there was a virtual home button available in iOS; but apparently there is.
My current wallet doesn't give me any affordances: https://grifiti.com/products/grifiti-band-joes-3-25-x-1-25-i...
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.
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
Minimal is often an enemy of usable.
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.
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.
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.
How about a simple, old fashioned text label for each card?
Will wonders never cease.
But that would require collaboration, and standards, which seem to have gone away as smart phones came in.
[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-overview/
[2] https://developer.android.com/identity/digital-credentials
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.
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.
> 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?
https://support.google.com/wallet/answer/12060038
Anything with a bar code or QR code will work. It's not complicated.
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.
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.
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.
https://girappe.com/ is also dead
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.
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!
Although it is not out yet, Garbage Country's art direction looks good :) wishlisted.
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…
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.
Doesn't help with the "automatic" part, but I try to remember to do this every few months.
Zero dollars, lets you geofence passes when you create them.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.apple.com/certificateauthority/
You could do the same thing with shortcuts I guess but using the first class feature is nice.
[0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/walletpasses [1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/passkit
[1] https://walletwallet.alen.ro/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46345745
https://apps.apple.com/app/id1486573384
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)#Sherlocked...
I guess there is no appetite for “antitrust” in the US right now.
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.
I've never tried to pay with Apple Pay on ticketmaster.com, but I assume I could do that as well.
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.
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.
This also means I can do it twice if I choose so.
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.
Thieves could snatch my paper ticket from my hands before, but at least in that situation I would be aware of it.
Surely this was considered earlier within Apple. I wonder what changed that they decided to do this now.
https://apps.apple.com/mw/app/pass4wallet-store-cards/id1423...
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.
That’s not really helping explain it, so here’s some examples:
Airplane tickets, library membership barcode, sports tickets, loyalty cards for your local coffee shop, conference tickets, etc.
Essentially anything with a barcode first and foremost. The website that this blog is about allows you to generate your own passes.
I think "create" is the confusing part. It should be "digitize" or something. Either this, or "pass" means something else here.
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?
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.
(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.
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
In my experience, if the code scans, the code scans.
I don’t really believe that places that require membership cards are going to let users start creating their own, though.
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.
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 had to switch to a physical card and the MTA advice was to get an iphone
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.
As long as it scans they don’t care.
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.
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.
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.
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!