alt Hacker NewsiOS 27 is adding a 'Create a Pass' button to Apple Wallet
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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 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.
> 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?
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!
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…
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.
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)?
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
Been using Wallet Creator for that matter. Free and no ads.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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].
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.
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?
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.
Oh great, Apple is sherlocking yet another category of apps (and not to mention Apple always had a convoluted and gatekeepy approach to letting passes show up in the Wallet app)
I guess there is no appetite for “antitrust” in the US right now.
This 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.
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"?
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?
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.
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.
they do the most obvious, sorely missing feature after over a decade of stubbornness and it goes straight to the top of HN
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.
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.
This is AI slop blogspam. Original article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-04/ios-27-fe...
Finally, there's a website out there to do it but holy shit was it a pain
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.