I’m a huge fan of Apple Wallet, not just for Apple Pay, but also as a single repository for all my tickets, boarding passes, and the like.
I love the proactive way they pop up when close to boarding time, making it a single tap to scan at a barrier, boarding gate, or manual ticket check …
The problem, of course, is that the app isn’t a single repository for all tickets, because not all of them support the Add to Wallet functionality.
Google Wallet has just solved this problem for Android smartphones.
Google Wallet for Android now has an expanded “Everything else” option for creating digital passes. Replacing the old “Photo” option, Everything else lets you “Scan a photo of any pass like an event ticket, gym membership, insurance card, and more” to create a digital version that appears in Google Wallet.
The app explains how AI is leveraged to “determine what kind of pass you’re adding and to suggest the content of the pass.”
In the US, you can even include paper-only passes by taking a photo of them.
You can save passes to Google Wallet from an image. Examples include:
- Library cards
- Gym passes
- Insurance cards
Of course, whether a company accepts digital copies of paper documents is another question, but during my switch to a paperless life more than a decade ago, I was pleasantly surprised.
But certainly when a company sends you an eTicket with a QR code, in 99.9% of cases they neither know nor care which app you are using to present it. I already use a Tickets album in the Photos app to store screengrabs of these, and it’s the screengrab I’m showing. Again, in a decade of doing this, I’ve found only one exception (a railcard which must be shown in the app).
All I’m asking, then, is for Apple to allow me to add those screengrabs to the Wallet app, and to scan the dates do that it can do the same proactive pop-ups it does for officially-supported tickets.
Is this a feature you’d like to see Apple offer? Please take our poll, and share your thoughts in the comments.
Image: 9to5Mac screengrab with background by Parrish Freeman on Unsplash
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
