alt Hacker NewsWhile 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.
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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 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.