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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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”

When I first started using it I thought something was broken

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.

There's also no way to go to the wallet from the actual shortcut screen you most commonly use (the double-click power one)

long hold to re-arrange your rearrange what your default card is - but to the bottom of the stack - is dumb

[dead]

> 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?