I think it’s about time Apple Wallet gets a fresh coat of paint. I love Apple Wallet / Apple Pay, both in terms of the privacy / simplicity of the software. It’s super easy to pay for things using my watch / phone, far more so than getting my actual MagSafe wallet off my phone and digging for the right card, and it’s awesome when traveling to not have to rely on the airline apps to display my ticket, especially when using different airlines during the same trip. You might have heard iOS 26 has a big update to Wallet, and it is! I have long struggled with different package trackers on my phone (packages often get stolen near where I live) so having one that works with my email of choice is very neat. The live activities for flights is really cool too, even as someone with a lifetime subscription to Flighty. However I am looking for a few specific things that I think will improve the overall experience of the app and allow me to use my physical wallet even less.

To understand what I think needs to change about Wallet, it’s important to understand its history on the platform. The Wallet app was first introduced in iOS 6 as “Passbook”. This was prior to the iPhone’s inclusion of NFC in the iPhone 6, and so at the time the app only existed to store your passes / tickets. Still a useful little feature, but a far cry from the app today. In iOS 6 and prior, the design of the system was skeuomorphic, a design philosophy that for our purposes here simply means that software should resemble the real world objects they are attempting to mimic the function of or replace. Your contacts list should look like a contact book, your notes app should look like a notepad, and your passbook should look like a wallet. Due to this the Passbook was just a list of passes that you could drag around. When the NFC card functionality was introduced and the app was renamed Wallet in iOS 9, this skeuomorphic design philosophy was in the past across the OS, but Wallet kept its layout the same since. It is a list of your payment cards at the top, and passes on the bottom. You can drag the passes up and down in a list, and that’s it. This works fine for infrequent use, but the goal of Apple Wallet is not just to be a useful little tool, it is to replace your wallet. In that regard, its primary interface could use a bit of updating.

In my Apple Wallet I have multiple credit cards and my debit card (my bank’s ATM’s support NFC). I have transit cards for different cities such as SF / LA for when I visit, and all together it looks like a bit of a mess. If you have too many credit cards at the top, it pushes all your passes down to the bottom. There’s no way to archive cards or hide them from the main view, even though the Clipper card will auto select itself whenever I tap my wallet to a reader at a MUNI station. That brings me to the first feature I would wish to add, a way to hide cards from the main view while keeping them in the app. Apple Wallet and Apple Pay often get conflated as services, but this is because the system purposefully conflates them. The cards in my Apple Wallet are the cards I use in Apple Pay on the web, but in real life this often isn’t the case.

Passes I think deserve the largest rework. Since iOS 6, many apps and companies have supported adding passes to Apple Wallet, and it’s become a core way that I organize / handle tickets to events. However it’s also how I store my library card, my health insurance information, my grocery rewards card, my art museum membership, my starbucks rewards (I only go there for the breakfast sandwiches, please believe me) etc. All of these things in addition to all the tickets to events such as festivals, flights, etc all clutter up this list that has no way to organize or categorize it. Apple’s solution to this is that passes can encode coordinates, allowing them to surface to the lock screen when they are relevant. This works great for flights / concert tickets, but in practice less so for my grocery store or library, where they just haven’t encoded the data at all. To fix this, I would allow users to sort these cards into folders or categories, and allow them to set locations where they show up if nothing has been set by the creator.

There’s also the areas where the app currently lacks coverage of pass / key types. For instance, the Amazon Prime code. It’s a dynamic rotating QR code, which makes a lot of sense for security! However support for this form of pass / code in Apple Wallet is… inconclusive at best. Giving it a search shows that this type of pass is not supported in the wallet app out of the box. This is also what AXS uses for many of its events, preventing you from adding concert tickets from there to your wallet. I agree the solution here is to use the NFC card functionality, but in practice most businesses do not care and I am left to pray that the AXS app connects to the internet when I am near the venue. Then there’s bluetooth keys. My gym uses GymMaster to let me unlock the door, and that’s a separate app that I need to open with a bluetooth function I need to manually activate. Would be great if I could add a bluetooth pass to my Wallet app that automatically surfaces when I am there!

Finally, there’s the rest of the Apple ecosystem. Wallet is an app as old as Apple Music, and yet it remains locked to the iPhone for some mysterious reason. You can edit your Apple Pay info in the settings app of the other platforms, but there’s no Wallet app. This means I can’t see my library card info, how much cash I have left at Starbucks, or my ID etc while on my computer without grabbing my phone. I recently migrated from 1Password to Apple Passwords, as I finally see it as meeting the bare minimum functionality to the point where I might as well cut down on another subscription service. However 1Password does have many features I miss, as it can act as a secure store for much more than just your passwords! It stored credit card numbers, TSA numbers, passport info, software licenses, bank info etc. To this extent the excellent Access app has replaced that, but as Apple Wallet seems to be moving in this direction too it should consider adding an app to the missing other platforms. Or at the very least, give me the ability to add passes from them! It’s nice when I see a pass in an email or after I book something on the web, but then I have to dig out my phone or download a proprietary app that I delete after I add the pass. Adding the ability to add passes from other platforms would perhaps incentivize more devs to simply put the passes in more accessible locations.

I’m glad to see Apple giving the Wallet app more attention in iOS 26, and I am hoping that this is the start of dedicated updates that improve the experience. With enough iteration we could end up with a digital wallet which is far more useful than our physical ones! Or at the very least, an easier way for me to get into my gym.