Hacker News Reader

Comment by giarc | Hacker News Reader

I have a few apps on my phone for which the only purpose is to open and bring up a barcode (ex. Tim Hortons Scan and Pay). I'd love to delete the app and only have an Apple Wallet thing.

View on HN

Anycode Wallet! I used it years ago to put my family’s library card in Apple Wallet. It supports a bunch of standards, and also you can use a photo (which I ended up using because my library uses some weird non-standard bar code).

Edit: also, it’s free.

Pass4Wallet has been my go-to recently (among the free options)

iOS 27 has brought on the ability to create passes yourself

That's amazing! Thanks for that info. I somehow missed it.

I wish Apple also added the ability to create widgets from them. For frequent cards like the grocery store or gym, it would be convenient to have them on the side screen.

Not for barcodes, which excludes almost all membership cards.

So far as I can tell this still requires an pass/wallet signing certificate from the apple developer program to use, so you can't use it to create ad hoc passes, unless you already have a $100 developer subscription.

If you’re on ios27, you can create ad-hoc passes on the phone from the Wallet app and customize it as needed.

And otherwise Pass4Wallet lets you do that on earlier versions too. And you can add an image or colors, the result doesn’t look bad imho

But if a company already has their own custom app for their bonus card, that means they already have the developer subscription

Yes but they are not going to sign your pass you make

I’m pretty sure the idea was that they would make a pass you can add to wallet instead of installing their app, not that they would sign the random pass you made. I doubt it though because they could have already done that. My local science academy stopped printing cards, they just give you something to add to wallet.

Yeah but most of these places want you installing their app

I mentioned that in my comment…

No, I mean, often they won’t even give you a wallet pass, they want you using their app specifically

Isn't it dumb that we have to go through all these fucking hoops to do something so obvious

I use an app called pass2 u wallet for this, it's clunky but works well. No affiliation.

Look for the SuperCards app. I have that for my pc optimum, metro, Canadian tire cards / barcodes. No more carrying 1000 loyalty cards around.

As of iOS 27 you can do this yourself, or physical barcodes, they just don’t look as nice as what this program can do.

The local library app is painfully slow on login to show my library barcode (it preloads all sorts of stuff it doesn’t need) and somehow never manages to stay logged in for any appreciable amount of time. It’s bad enough that it’s faster for me to open the library website, login, go to the menu item to display the library barcode and use that to check out books. Creating a new pass on my phone for the library took less time than logging into their app did. It’s really great for that.

One gotcha with some of the app stuff is that, especially for scan and pay, the barcode is dynamic and you can’t avoid the app. I know that’s the case for the 7-eleven app and its barcode for loyalty/scan and pay.

A little over a year ago I created a little app to store QR or barcodes and use them either from the app or through a widget, it's called PeekCard [1].

I was wondering if iOS 27 Wallet opening up custom passes was going to mean I could abandon my little app, but for me it's not the right solution. It creates large portrait size passes which are designed to contain meta info about the cards purpose. What I want is a name, color and the QR or barcode. With the "Create a Pass" in Wallet I get these big things, almost all space wasted with a relatively small barcode that I can't use as a widget. So for me it's a "no", I'll stick with my own app.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/app/peekcard/id6749822787

Starbucks on Google can be added to Google Wallet. But then I went to use it and they told me to close wallet and open the app. Shrug.

I've had patchy success with adding boarding passes to the wallet too. Support seems half baked.

Tim Horton's allows reward card in Apple Wallet, but not Scan And Pay (which gives rewards and pays for order at same time). I wonder if the addition of the payment creates a dynamic QR code controlled by the app, and therefore not allowed in Apple Wallet for some reason.

EDIT - I think this is the case. When I open and close my Scan and Pay QR code it is changing each time whereas my Reward only card (in Apple Wallet) is static. Must be due to security.

Wallet transactions are all effectively presented as offline. I usually pay with Apple Wallet at Maverick (fuel/cstore). When I do so, the rewards account, which is also in Wallet, automagically applies. It stays even if I remove the app. I’ve seen it be broken in various ways over the past several years but at this point it all works right. The app matters in theory to authenticate and generate the Pass, but is otherwise inert. I had it running with no iOS permission enabled it but never used it and eventually dropped it. It had points and deals and such, and that’s what websites are for.

It's probably because if someone were to get your static barcode (some account number?), they'd be able to use it immediately and forever. Whereas the QR code is a payment link that authenticates on the backend. Kind of like a credit card magstrip versus the chip.

That's funny. I've paid at Starbucks with a screenshot plenty of times, but they probably thought it was the real app.

I was going to say, I scan screenshots of passes/codes all the time, including airplanes and busses. I haven't tried a photo, but I feel like there's a good shot it would work just fine. I wonder if a gallery app could be a poor man's pass app.

The wallet app is honestly foreign to me, I just have QR codes in my camera roll

In China I was surprised a few years ago when my train ticket did not work like this. Needed data on to do a live update of the QR code, or something live in any case.

It used to be difficult to scan qr codes with black backgrounds and older phone apps will blast their screen LED lights to make it easier for the qr scanner to read it, but in the end, all you're doing is scanning a qr code usually.

I had the black background issue at concerts for years but I haven't had that problem in the last 2 years.

HDR maybe? An image by itself can now tell the screen to go full brightness on selective parts or the whole thing. Actually more than full brightness.

While you had the app,

or without it installed?

Wouldn’t you still need the app to claim promotions and coupons?

iOS 27 includes this feature built in now

Reply on news.ycombinator.com