Apple has spent more than a decade trying to get every gym, cinema, airline, and transit system on Earth to build native passes for its Wallet app. Most have not. The gym down your street still gives you a QR code in a standalone app.

The cinema chain still emails you a PDF. The local transit card still lives in its own app with its own interface and its own notification preferences. Apple’s Wallet is a beautifully designed container that most of the world’s service providers have not bothered to fill. In iOS 27, Apple is changing its approach. Instead of waiting for developers to build passes, it is letting users build their own.

The feature

The new “Create a Pass” tool, discovered in test versions of iOS 27 ahead of its expected announcement at WWDC on 8 June, allows users to take any QR code and generate a custom digital pass around it inside the Wallet app. The feature is accessible via the “+” button in Wallet and through the page where users normally add credit cards. The interface prompts users to “create passes for tickets, memberships, gift cards and more.”

Users can create a pass from scratch or point the iPhone’s camera at a QR code to import it directly.

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Apple is testing three templates: standard, in orange, as a default for any type of pass; membership, in blue, for recurring-access scenarios like gyms; and event, in purple, for tickets to concerts, matches, and screenings. Each template includes customisation tools for styles, images, colours, and text fields, giving users control over the information displayed on each pass. The result is that any service that provides a QR code for entry, payment, or identification can now have a presence in Wallet, whether or not the service’s developer has ever heard of PassKit.

The gap

PassKit, Apple’s framework for creating Wallet-compatible passes, has been available since iOS 6 in 2012. It supports boarding passes, event tickets, coupons, store cards, and generic passes, and it allows developers to update pass content remotely, trigger location-based notifications, and integrate with Apple Pay.

The framework is well documented, free to use, and supported by a healthy ecosystem of third-party tools that can generate passes without writing code. Apple has built its payments and wallet infrastructure methodically, each feature reinforcing the next: Tap to Pay turned every iPhone into a payment terminal, Apple Pay brought cards into Wallet, and PassKit was supposed to bring everything else.

It did not work. Fourteen years after PassKit launched, the majority of small and mid-sized businesses that issue QR codes for entry, membership, or loyalty have not adopted it. The reasons are mundane: building and maintaining a Wallet pass requires a developer account, a server to host pass updates, and ongoing attention to a feature that most businesses consider a minor convenience rather than a strategic priority.

The result is a fragmented experience in which some passes live in Wallet and most do not, undermining the app’s usefulness as a single place for everything in a user’s pocket.

The shift

The “Create a Pass” feature is Apple’s admission that the developer-first strategy has reached its ceiling. Digital wallets are converging toward a universal model in which identity documents, payment credentials, transit passes, and event tickets all live in a single interface, and Apple cannot afford to let Wallet’s utility depend on whether a local gym in Dusseldorf has a developer on staff who knows PassKit. By letting users create their own passes from any QR code, Apple is decoupling Wallet’s growth from developer adoption and tying it instead to user behaviour, a resource Apple has in abundance.

The design is characteristically controlled. Users are not building arbitrary content. They are wrapping existing QR codes in Apple-designed templates with Apple-defined customisation parameters.

The three template categories, standard, membership, and event, map to the most common use cases that PassKit adoption has failed to serve. Apple is not opening Wallet to user-generated chaos. It is building a structured bridge between the unstructured QR codes that businesses already issue and the curated Wallet experience that Apple wants users to rely on.

The context

The pass builder is one of several enhancements planned for iOS 27. The headline feature is a revamped Siri, now powered in part by Google’s Gemini models under a multi-year deal reportedly costing Apple around $1 billion per year. Siri will get a dedicated app, a new interface in the Dynamic Island, and the ability to function as a text-based conversational assistant alongside its voice capabilities.

Apple is also expanding AI features across photo editing, with generative tools to extend and reframe images, and introducing a Siri Camera Mode that uses Visual Intelligence to provide real-time information about objects, text, and locations the camera sees.

Apple’s $2 billion acquisition of Q.ai, the Israeli silent-speech AI startup, signals that the company is investing heavily in new interaction modalities that go beyond voice and touch. The Wallet pass builder sits in a different part of the product but reflects the same strategic impulse: making the iPhone more useful in more contexts without requiring third parties to build the bridge. Silent speech recognition lets the iPhone understand you without you speaking.

Custom passes let Wallet hold your tickets without the venue building an integration. In both cases, Apple is removing the dependency on external partners that has limited what the iPhone can do.

Apple’s iOS ecosystem is also contending with a surge in low-quality app submissions driven by AI-assisted “vibe coding,” which has flooded the App Store with hastily built apps. The Wallet pass builder may partially address this from the other direction: instead of downloading a bad app to access a QR code, users can skip the app entirely and bring the code into Wallet.

It is a small but meaningful reduction in the number of unnecessary apps that exist solely to display a barcode or QR code, a category that accounts for a non-trivial share of App Store clutter.

The question

Apple Wallet has expanded steadily from payments to identity, adding driver’s licences, state IDs, and now user-created passes. Each expansion makes Wallet more central to daily life and more difficult to replace. The “Create a Pass” feature is not technically ambitious. It is strategically significant.

It converts a product that depended on a supply-side network effect, developers building passes, into one that can grow through a demand-side network effect, users creating them. Apple has tried for fourteen years to convince the long tail of businesses to adopt PassKit. The pass builder concedes that most never will, and routes around the problem.

Whether users actually build custom passes in meaningful numbers is an open question. The feature requires a degree of manual effort, scanning a QR code, choosing a template, customising the appearance, that most users may not undertake for a gym membership they use three times a week.

The value will depend on how well the camera integration works, how quickly the pass is generated, and whether Apple adds automation, such as suggesting a pass creation when the camera detects a QR code in a supported context. The templates are a starting point. The ambition is to make Wallet the default home for every credential, ticket, and token a person carries, regardless of whether the issuer ever built a thing. After fourteen years of waiting for the supply side to show up, Apple is betting on the demand side instead.