HN

Comments (228)

• Menu

  kilian
  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.
• odysseus
  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.
• Menu

  DrewADesign
  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.
• Menu

  noio
  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!
• Menu

  randusername
  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.
• Menu

  Liquid_Fire
  > 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?
• Menu

  lxgr
  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…
• Menu

  dschep
  This is just parity with google wallet, right? AFAICT my library card in google wallet is just a generic card/pass type.
• alt227
  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.
• ghaff
  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.
• Menu

  mosburger
  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)?
• thewavelength
  I need this without knowing before that I needed this. Makes me question why this wasn’t implemented years ago. Anyway, great.
• Menu

  toenail
  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
• petetnt
  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
• Menu

  seldomcomment
  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
• Menu

  ivanjermakov
  Been using Wallet Creator for that matter. Free and no ads.https://apps.apple.com/app/id1486573384
• isodev
  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.
• Menu

  latexr
  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.
• vrc
  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.
• resters
  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.
• Menu

  intrasight
  Could someone explain what a "pass" is in this context?
• dec0dedab0de
  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.
• ghaff
  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.
• Menu

  maratc
  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?
• baby-yoda
  Fingers crossed they'll finally add Code 39 barcode generation.
• Menu

  DecoPerson
  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.
• Menu

  nottorp
  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.
• Menu

  jstanley
  What is a "pass"?
• Menu

  cormorant
  Who's to say the business that issued the ticket will accept your homemade imitation? with "adjustable styles, images, colors, and text fields"?
• Menu

  aczerepinski
  As long as we're innovating, how about adding tap to pay to the physical apple cards?
• halflife
  Will this work only with scannable codes? Or with NFC as well?
• bilsbie
  Pretty useful. I wish more places would allow this. My zoo membership makes you install their app just to enter.
• Menu

  nunez
  Damn; PassWallet just got Sherlocked.
• Menu

  flymasterv
  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.
• skiing_crawling
  they do the most obvious, sorely missing feature after over a decade of stubbornness and it goes straight to the top of HN
• Menu

  chuckadams
  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.
• dawnerd
  And yet there's still credit cards that don't support Apple Wallet. Looking at you Citi Best Buy card...
• Menu

  jonathanstrange
  What is a "pass" in that context?
• Menu

  sen
  Now we just need the ability to add custom NFC/RFID passes in the Wallet app for workplace doors/lifts/etc.
• konschubert
  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.
• Menu

  rafram
  This is AI slop blogspam. Original article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-04/ios-27-fe...
• mghackerlady
  Finally, there's a website out there to do it but holy shit was it a pain
• mihaaly
  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!
• stavros
  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?
• anon
  undefined
• throwuxiytayq
  [dead]