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Developer Access to iPhone's NFC Chip Coming in iOS 11
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You're speaking out of ignorance, not engineering. You simply dont know whether your opinions are actually true.
Interesting previous blog prediction of this from a large tag provider:
https://gototags.com/blog/apple-iphone-8-support-nfc-tags/
"These aren’t small projects either; GoToTags has many customers whose projects have deployed 100k+ NFC tags and a handful that have deployed 1M+. These projects are also becoming more consumer focused. Recently Nintendo released amiibo, which has NFC enabled physical characters, and we sold out of our stock of the NTAG215 chip type within hours (don’t worry, more on the way). All of this in a market where nobody knows that NFC is even happening.
"What will change Apple’s mind? In many of these projects, because the iPhone does not support NFC tags, the business is either forced to choose Android as their device platform, or live in a world where their iPhone app is crippled compared to its Android counterpart.
"The NFC functionality is too important for these products. Thus, the iPhone loses its prestige and looks inferior to its Android competitors. That is a big deal and as soon as Apple believes this it will reassess its stance on NFC.
"Remember that originally Steve Jobs didn’t want to allow apps on the iPhone, yet they caved in due to market pressure from companies that wanted to offer products to consumers via mobile devices. Now the App Store is a massive revenue generator for Apple and an integral part of the mobile experience. NFC is the next step in the technology arms race. Do you think Apple is going to sit back and ignore Nintendo and others’ success?"
https://gototags.com/blog/apple-iphone-8-support-nfc-tags/
"These aren’t small projects either; GoToTags has many customers whose projects have deployed 100k+ NFC tags and a handful that have deployed 1M+. These projects are also becoming more consumer focused. Recently Nintendo released amiibo, which has NFC enabled physical characters, and we sold out of our stock of the NTAG215 chip type within hours (don’t worry, more on the way). All of this in a market where nobody knows that NFC is even happening.
"What will change Apple’s mind? In many of these projects, because the iPhone does not support NFC tags, the business is either forced to choose Android as their device platform, or live in a world where their iPhone app is crippled compared to its Android counterpart.
"The NFC functionality is too important for these products. Thus, the iPhone loses its prestige and looks inferior to its Android competitors. That is a big deal and as soon as Apple believes this it will reassess its stance on NFC.
"Remember that originally Steve Jobs didn’t want to allow apps on the iPhone, yet they caved in due to market pressure from companies that wanted to offer products to consumers via mobile devices. Now the App Store is a massive revenue generator for Apple and an integral part of the mobile experience. NFC is the next step in the technology arms race. Do you think Apple is going to sit back and ignore Nintendo and others’ success?"
Ok thx. I know very little about NFC security and how it works, certainly compared to IP and WiFi security. I'm still a little skittish about putting NFC in the hands of all developers, and it's not just about stealing wallet contents. Maybe I shouldn't be, but human animals fear what we don't understand.
I don't need the iPhone to emulate my chip card, I need the iPhone to save the monthly pass to the chip card. At the moment I buy the pass online but I have to place the chip card on the reader of the vending machines in order to save the pass to the card itself prior the first use. Android users can hold the pass to their phones and it saves the pass on the chip card.
Does this mean theoretically an app could be made it imitate Amiibo's, or would the best case scenario just be an iOS port of TagMo?
Which subway?
And when you say, "save the pass to the chip card", you mean to one of your Apple Pay payment cards, so that when you tap, you get a better deal?
Doubtful that it's letting you transfer money, so it must somehow be sending an association between your payment card and your monthly pass, back to the subway computer.
In any case, it sounds like your phone would at least need card reader mode, so that it could pick up what's on the monthly pass and do whatever it needs to do with it. The iPhone might be able to do that now.
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I wish! I've been trying to figure out a way to do it on my android phone and so far no luck being able to replicate one of those cards.
Would like to see access to the freestyle libre clucose monitor. But then, of course a non invasive thingy on the apple watch would be better anyway (we don't have diabetes but we like to check our glocose levels from time to time and see how we react to certain food etc.)
(we don't have diabetes but we like to check our glocose levels from time to time and see how we react to certain food etc.)There is a lot more to then just getting it to work on an older device. It's not as straight forward as people think.
Software/firmware developers will tell you it that even having a single most insignificant thing missing from an eviroment can bring it to it's knees.
Siri was likely being developed specifically for the iPhone 4s, meaning everything to the last detail on the 4s was there to support Siri. Now trying to go backwards to make it work as well as it did on the 4s? Different story.
In the case of Siri I am sure there was some motivation to keep it only on newer models as it is a significant feature but for NFC? Hey Siri? NIGHT SHIFT? common, apple isn't that desperate for your money. If they were they would have no supported iOS11 at all on the 5s.
No and no.
For an app to imitate Amiibo's, the phone would have to pretend to be a tag to a reader.
iOS11 can be a reader for some tags not a tag to readers (except for those on cards from Apple Pay friendly banks).
TagMo : "Android app for which allows cloning Amiibos using blank NTAG215 NFC tags.".
iOS11 will not write to tags, read only, so no way.
Thanks for clarifying, I was under the assumption that code is transferred during an NFC event, is it read only or some data is transferred in the process?
The use case for transferring phone number or contact information is a limited use case, something that I would encounter once every six months, I can imagine others who need the capability with regularity.
Nope, no code is transferred.
NDEF messages themselves are dirt simple. Like, a message might be "Type: website, Location: www.macrumors.com". Or "Type: contact, Name: xxx, Address: yyy", etc.
Now, yes, a phone maker can go further and create customized NDEF messages. For instance, such as Android Beam, which sets up a temporary direct WiFi connection to make fast data transfers possible. E.g. to pass the actual photo or video, versus just passing a link to it.
I would not be surprised at all if Apple took advantage of custom (proprietary) messages. Especially at stores. I can imagine tapping an iPhone on a poster could transfer a special Apple coupon, etc. I know they have beacons already, but not sure of their adoption.
Yeah, it's just another useful tool if you both have and use it. It's the same as NFC payments, which are never used by the vast majority of people with that capability (e.g. only like 5% of Apple Pay capable owners).
As I noted elsewhere, I use simple NFC constantly with my son-in-law to share stuff while we sit next to each other. It's fun and super easy. No extra buttons to press to send like with SMS. Just hold the phones together, while my phone is displaying the item of interest. He gets a notification of incoming info, and can allow it or not. I say, "Hey check out this YouTube video", we touch our phones, and he taps the "Accept" button that pops up on his screen and is taken to the same video.
In other words, it's all related to whatever app I'm using at the time. If I'm in a browser, it'll send a URL. If in YouTube, ditto. If in Contacts, it sends the contact I'm on. And so forth. If I'm in an app and he doesn't have anything registered to accept that kind of data, then it sends him to the app store to get the same app if he wishes. Oh like if I showed a PDF and he didn't have any PDF viewers. Like that.
Privacy advocates should like it, because neither side needs to know anything about the other. No phone number, no special group name, nothing.
Others love simple NFC reading in order to be able to tap on speakers and automatically start a Bluetooth connection (the speaker might pass its BT name and password via NDEF).
Many love custom tags most of all, and will have tags at their front door, at their bedside, in their car, at the office; so that they can tap and instantly change display mode / comms / WiFi / etc.
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No. In my city we have monthly passes as old school paper tickets and on plastic nfc chip cards. To load a new pass to the plastic card you go either to the ticket office, the vending machine or buy the ticket online. While when you buy the ticket at the office or the machine they will save the ticket data to the chip card immediately it works differently when you buy tickets online. The pass still has to find a way to your plastic nfc chip card. So when you use the pass the first time you place it to the reader of the nearest vending machine. It checks that the chip is empty, it checks that with that specific number you bought a pass already online and it transfers the pass data to that chip so you can use it. Now you can also transfer the online tickets to the plastic card with your android phones nfc reader so you don't have to go to the vending machine to activate your pass.
Sorry it sounds complicated but it actually is pretty easy once you have done it. At the moment I can't do this with the iPhone so I have to do the extra step of activating the pass before the first use.
Ah, so it sounds like the Android phone's NFC is being used as a writer in this case, allowing the transfer of the online purchase info, from the phone onto the card.
If so, then if the iPhone's NFC is limited to being a reader, it isn't going to be able to do the same.
I have some cattle on my little life style block, all ear tagged with NFC.
Being an iOS developer I looked into not having to fork out $500 on an ear tag reader for keeping my legal records up to date but instead writing a little App to use my iPhone to scan them in the yards.
From the research I did I found out that the iPhones NFC circuitry was only capable of transmitting, not receiving, NFC codes.
It would appear that all iPhones from series 7 can RX/TX NFC which is why only they support it.
Why it's taken until now for Apple to include support can only be guessed at. I suspect it'll be to do with the comms chip set they are using which has hamstrung them until recently.
Being an iOS developer I looked into not having to fork out $500 on an ear tag reader for keeping my legal records up to date but instead writing a little App to use my iPhone to scan them in the yards.
From the research I did I found out that the iPhones NFC circuitry was only capable of transmitting, not receiving, NFC codes.
It would appear that all iPhones from series 7 can RX/TX NFC which is why only they support it.
Why it's taken until now for Apple to include support can only be guessed at. I suspect it'll be to do with the comms chip set they are using which has hamstrung them until recently.
Thanks for the response! It makes more sense now.
I still don't know why on earth they'd design the chips that way. Oh well.
The iPhone SE has on board NFC correct? So no support for that I imagine. Thanks Cupertino.