Why would anyone be using images of government IDs when modern documents have NFC chips with the data, signed and with anti-cloning mechanisms on them? If they can verify an Apple Reference Image they can verify an NFC document.
Interfacing with images is easy. Interfacing with NFC takes work. I have experienced precisely zero identity-verification workflows which NFC'd anything, and that includes my banks, which could easily ask for my debit card's NFC but don't.
I think processing that information is mandatory now, but probably was optional/largely unimplemented in 2012. But maybe I'm off by five years or so?
The CA public key I just got off my country’s website, they were kind enough to just publish it :)
If anything, verifying NFC is easier than images. Asking the chip in my identity card to provide a cryptographically-signed "This document belongs to Jane Doe" request is a handful of lines of code. Doing the same with images? Good luck coming up with an approach which isn't fooled by a photocopy!
Our national app for logging into government sites and confirming things also requires a step where the ID’s NFC is read to reach the highest trust level.
So it’s definitely becoming more and more common here.
The phone is just a relay to a remote server here, as newer ICAO machine readable travel documents intentionally don't support signatures/non-repudiation anymore, so you have to run the entire exchange against a component you trust (i.e. your server, not so much your app on a rooted/manipulated phone).