Alen Todorov (via Hacker News, MacRumors):
After 14 years of waiting on developers to ship Wallet support, Apple is letting users do it themselves. Here is what Bloomberg is reporting, how the new flow works, and what it means for third-party tools like WalletWallet.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported on Monday that iOS 27 will add a “Create a Pass” feature to the Wallet app. Tap the “+” button you already use to add credit cards or pass emails, and Wallet will offer something it has never offered before on iPhone: a path to build your own pass.
You can scan a QR code on a paper ticket or membership card with the camera, or build a pass from scratch in a layout editor. The whole flow runs without an Apple Developer account, a Pass Type ID, or any certificate signing.
[…]
Apple shipped PassKit alongside iOS 6 back in 2012. The pitch was clean: businesses build .pkpass files, customers tap to add, everyone wins. In practice, the consistent adopters ended up being airlines, big-box retailers, ticketing platforms, and a handful of national chains. Most gyms, cafes, libraries, rec centers, and small loyalty programs never built one, because the path requires an Apple Developer account, signing certificates, and enough engineering work that “just print a paper card” almost always won the budget conversation.
This seems like it should have been a day one feature except that perhaps Apple worried that it would disincentivize developers from adopting PassKit. Instead, people created Photos albums with pictures of bar codes.
noio:
15 years ago, a friend of mine built an app to do this — “Pass Creator” — then Apple yanked the functionality.
kilian:
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.
I wish Wallet supported search while in Apple Pay mode and a way to add your own notes/comments to each card.
Previously:
Apple Pay iOS iOS 27 iOS App QR Codes Strategy Tax Wallet WalletWallet
Juli Clover (Slashdot, Hacker News):
Apple will pay $250 million to settle a class action lawsuit accusing it of false advertising and unfair competition after the personalized Siri features it promoted when launching the iPhone 16 were delayed.
A smarter, Apple Intelligence version of Siri was shown off at WWDC 2024, and then promoted in ads and videos when the iPhone 16 launched in September 2024. After Apple delayed the Siri Apple Intelligence features in March 2025, Apple pulled its ads, but they had been running for several months at that point.
If you really did buy an $800+ iPhone because of advertised features that never shipped, getting back $25 doesn’t seem like much consolation. I’m not sure what would make sense, though. With a lot of products, you could just extend the return period, but returning an iPhone months or a year later is not very useful because you probably no longer have your old phone to switch back to.
Previously:
Apple Apple Intelligence iOS iOS 18 iPhone 16 Lawsuit Legal Siri
Nilay Patel (Hacker News):
It’s a way of thinking that basically created our modern world. Marc Andreessen, the literal embodiment of software brain, called it in 2011 when he wrote the piece “Why software is eating the world” as an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. But software thinking has been turbocharged by AI in a way that I think helps explain the enormous gap between how excited the tech industry is about the technology and how regular people are growing to dislike it more and more over time.
[…]
The simplest definition I’ve come up with is that it’s when you see the whole world as a series of databases that can be controlled with the structured language of software code. Like I said, this is a powerful way of seeing things. So much of our lives run through databases, and a bunch of important companies have been built around maintaining those databases and providing access to them.
[…]
Any business process that looks like code talking to a database in a repetitive way is up for grabs. That’s why Anthropic has been so relentlessly focused on enterprise customers, and it’s why OpenAI is now pivoting to business use. There’s real value in introducing AI to business, because so much of modern business is already software: collecting data, analyzing it, and taking action on it over and over again in a loop. Businesses also control their data, and they can demand that all their databases work together.
In this way, software brain has ruled the business world for a long time. AI has just made it easier than ever for more people to make more software than ever before — for every kind of business to automate big chunks of itself with software. It’s everywhere: the absolute cutting edge of advertising and marketing is automation with AI. It’s not being a creative.
Via John Gruber:
It’s up for debate what exactly is off and what should be done about it, but the undeniable proof that something is profoundly off is the deep unpopularity surrounding everything related to AI. You can’t argue that the public always turns against groundbreaking technology. The last two epoch-defining shifts in technology were the smartphone in the 2000s, and the Internet/web in the 1990s. Neither of those moments generated this sort of mainstream popular backlash. I’d say in both of those cases, regular people were optimistically curious. The single most distinctive thing about “AI” today is the vociferous public opposition to it and deeply pessimistic expectations about what it’s going to do.
Maybe the closest analog is social media, where people love to talk about how bad it is and yet continue right on using it. In both cases, there’s the sense that abstinence is not really an option because you’ll be left behind, and meanwhile the technology is providing real utility.
Previously:
Artificial Intelligence Business Database Web
