Add your own stuff to Apple Wallet

Wallet on iPhone is a bulging catch-all. Apple stores all your payment card information there, and it’s an interface for adding and removing cards, as well as viewing associated details. It’s the place where you interact with your Apple Card (like scheduling payments or viewing transaction reports), the Apple Card savings account, and Apple Cash. But it also handles related but miscellaneous categories of other things: tickets for events, reward cards, membership cards, your library card… really, anything with a number, a scannable code, or a connection to payment winds up there. Despite all that, Wallet has been deficient: you couldn’t easily add items to Wallet that the party issuing them hadn’t formatted and made available with an “Add to Apple Wallet” button, whether from a website or within its app. Starting in iOS 27—coming in September but available in a public beta now—you can use a new pass-creation tool to make your virtual billfold even larger. Third-party tools still fill the gap for iOS 26 and earlier users, or for those who want customization that Apple isn’t providing in Create a Pass. Make your own Wallet entry In iOS 27, open the Wallet app and tap the Add button in the upper-right corner. You’ll notice that among the options you’re familiar with, Create a Pass appears. Tap that. If you have a device that supports Visual Intelligence and the pass has a barcode or QR code, tap Continue, and Wallet opens a camera sheet.1 When you tap the shutter button, Visual Intelligence analyzes the image and tries to extract elements, like your name, the organization name, or the code. If it can’t, it will offer a Try Again and Create Pass Manually dialog. If it’s successful, Wallet next displays a preview screen. You can tap Add to accept the pass as it appears, or tap Edit Pass to modify the fields shown and the contents of those fields. Scan a card, even a munged-up old one like the at left, and Wallet can extract important details. I added the expiration date. There’s a quirk in editing fields that baffled me for a while, but I teased out the answer in testing. Apple pre-populates field areas, marked with white rounded rectangles with subtle glowing edges. If you tap the Edit button (in the lower-right corner) and choose Add/Remove Fields, you cannot add new field areas. (See the figure for how I’ve labeled this.) What you can do is tap on an existing field within a field area to change it, or you can tap within a glowing rectangle (the field area) to add another field. This is not a great interface, and I expect it will mature. A field areas, as I call it, is a place you can add and remove fields from. Tap the Palette icon to change the background color or choose a different background image from a small set in the Wallet library. If Visual Intelligence isn’t available or you want to build the pass element-by-element: Tap Create Pass Manually. On the Choose Pass Template screen, pick the data format and default color scheme to use for your pass: Standard, Membership, or Event. This pre-populates different fields for you to fill out. (You can change the color later via the Palette icon.) Next, tap fields to enter data. Each field has a label in smaller type and placeholder text in larger type. Tap Add Code to scan a barcode or QR code. When finished, tap the blue checkmark. You can then tap the Palette icon to change its appearance, or tap Edit: Add/Remove Fields icon to further edit the pass. If you create a pass manually, Apple adds a number of field areas and fields for you to modify (left). You have access to many different kinds of fields from an extensive list (right). After the pass is added to Wallet, you can tap it, tap the More button, then tap Edit Pass. You can also tap Pass Details to see the raw information added. The View Original Photo button lets you bring up the picture you took if you used Visual Intelligence. If you’re not yet using the iOS 27 beta or want options that Apple isn’t offering, you could try one of these free tools. Be aware, however, that Wallet passes have to be signed, so any data you provide to these companies is sent to them in the clear. Both have details in their privacy policies about how they protect your data. Wallet Creator (iOS app) has over 80 prebuilt templates for existing businesses, or you can roll your own pass or card. Wallet Creator says the app collects no data. However, the App Store’s description for the app, under “Our Terms of Use & Privacy Policy,” provides more information about how data is sent to a server, processed, and deleted. WalletWallet (web app) is a single-page form to create a pass. The page offers no privacy information, but it’s built using a business-oriented API the company makes, and that API has this explanation on the trip your data takes. My book on Wallet, Take Control of Apple Wallet, will be updated later this year to incorporate all of this new information. iPad and Mac have empty pockets While Apple brought the Phone app to iPad and Mac in iPadOS 26 and Tahoe, the company still treats Wallet as a second-class citizen on those two platforms, even though both allow the use of Apple Pay. I’d love to have Wallet synced and fully available for managing all cards, not just payment-related ones, as a standalone app in the future. [Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.] [Glenn Fleishman is a printing and comics historian, Jeopardy champion, and serial Kickstarterer. His current books in preparation, which you can pre-order, are Flong Time, No See, and That One Matt Bors Comic. Other books include Six Centuries of Type & Printing and How Comics Are Made.] If you appreciate articles like this one, support us by becoming a Six Colors subscriber. Subscribers get access to an exclusive podcast, members-only stories, and a special community.