Is Apple ready to tag NFC?
It would appear that - at long last - good news for NFC companies are coming out of the Apple camp. During the last developers conference, Apple announced that they will be opening up their iPhone in the next revision of iOS to allow the iPhone to read NFC tags. Support for NFC tag reading is also being added to the Apple Watch with the release of watchOS 4.
With the Apple iOS 11 update supporting NFC tags, all iPhone 7 and newer models will be able to read NFC tags just like Android. In terms of numbers, this means that over 2 billion smartphone owners could now have an NFC reader available in their pocket to interact with NFC tags. For our industry, this is the moment that many have been waiting for. It could signal a seismic shift in consumer interaction - now that NFC has become a ‘horizontal’ technology lumped in with other maturing data transfer technologies such as wireless or bluetooth.
Just imagine how happy all those NFC tag suppliers or beacon developers are going to be. As the NFC Forum wrote in an email to me, “How we interact with physical and digital items going forward will change forever. Think explosion in Internet-of-things, retail, public transport, automotive smartphone use cases for consumers. Think of all the companies started on the premise of the universality of NFC, IoT, mobility . . . their market has almost doubled overnight.”
During the conference, Apple’s WWDC keynote gave one hint that the use of their on-board NFC chip was being extended beyond payment when it showed the Apple Watch syncing data with gym equipment, but a new developer document spotted by Endgadget says that third-party apps will be able to use it too. “The new framework appears to let the chip in the latest iPhones read any tags – not just Apple Pay tags – and take action on them based on the phone’s location. NFC could open up more ways for iOS apps to communicate with connected devices and iPhones could also replace NFC-based keycards or transit passes like London’s Oyster card and the Bay Area’s Clipper card.”
But things may not all be as they seem.
9to5Mac wrote, “Apple has strongly resisted giving NFC to bank apps on security grounds. The company argues that Apple Pay represents the gold standard for payment security, and doesn’t want banks to be able to offer less secure solutions”. Even Engadget speculates that Apple may prohibit device pairing via NFC in order to maintain the exclusivity of its proprietary easy-pairing system based on the W1 chip.
Apple’s developer document doesn’t give many clues as to the forms of usage that may or may not be permitted saying, “Your app can read tags to give users more information about their physical environment and the real-world objects in it. For example, your app might give users information about products they find in a store or exhibits they visit in a museum,” perhaps indicating that apps will only be allowed to read NFC tags when they are in the foreground, so they won’t be able to pop up notifications automatically when a tag is detected. A marketing ploy that has been hotly debated at various Contactless Intelligence conferences in the past.
“We have been testing the iPhone 7 with IOS 11 beta to make absolutely sure they are capable of scanning NFC stickers and automating activities on a mobile and our results have been very positive,” Chris Humphries, CEO, ZipNFC told Contactless Intelligence. “There are some key differences of the iPhone NFC reading implementation compared to Android. For instance, you have to have an app to enable NFC reading and the app has to be your active app and in the foreground (no background reading). The app can only scan for a tag for 1 minute before you have to action again. The current Core NFC library today is very limited as it stands, but we expect the library to expand over time.”
Whatever comes out of the next iOS revision (expected this autumn), one thing is certain - there are going to be a lot of of third party developers working with NFC tags that are going to be very, very happy.
Steve Atkins
Contactless Intelligence
