Copyright 9to5Mac
We learned back at WWDC25 that US passport support would be coming to Apple Wallet. It hasn’t yet arrived in iOS 26, but the company yesterday confirmed that it is on the way. An update to the Apple website last month told us to expect it by the end of the year, and Apple’s VP of Apple Pay and Apple Wallet, Jennifer Bailey, confirmed in a conference keynote that it is still happening … How US passport support will work US passport support will work in much the same way as making an Apple Pay transaction. You’ll be invited to tap your iPhone to a reader and your digital passport information will be transmitted by NFC in the same way as your card details when making a payment. The secure protocol used allows the TSA system to verify that your passport details are genuine. It’s important to understand what you will and won’t be able to do with your digital passport. In particular, you will not be able to use it to travel internationally: that will still require your physical passport. The primary function will be to confirm your identity at TSA checkpoints for domestic flights. As always, there is important small-print, with Apple saying that the option to present digital passports will be available only at “select TSA checkpoints.” We don’t yet know which airports will offer support, but based on past rollouts of other digital travel initiatives, we can likely expect the option to be restricted to a relatively small number of airports at launch. Privacy concerns Some have expressed concerns that this requires you to unlock your iPhone, making the contents potentially available for inspection. This is not the case. Exactly as with Apple Pay, Face ID only unlocks the ability of the Apple Wallet app to transmit details to the terminal; it doesn’t unlock the phone itself. But the argument is largely irrelevant anyway. The rights that government officials do or don’t have to inspect the contents of your phone are determined by law, not by the technicalities of this type of feature. Moving toward a digital future An eventual future where we can travel internationally carrying only our iPhone for passport and visa purposes would be a huge benefit. A physical passport is an incredibly valuable possession, and there is a ready market for stolen ones – US passports in particular. That means we are traveling with something people are very motivated to steal, which can be particularly problematic when visiting countries which require us to carry our passport on us. Even where this is not a legal requirement, there are often major tourist attractions such as observation decks in tall buildings which require a passport for proof of identity when entering. The security features present in today’s passports make them much harder to tamper with than was the case in the past, but it’s still very much easier for a forger to start with a genuine passport than to try to create a fake from scratch. A US passport modified by a forger is very unlikely to be successfully used for international travel, but it can be used for a variety of other purposes, such as opening fraudulent bank accounts and applying for government benefits. A digital passport would be massively more secure since it would be protected by Face ID or Touch ID. An eventual future where we no longer need to carry either a physical wallet or passport also means that we have just a single possession to safeguard when wandering around a foreign city, rather than multiple ones. Security concerns aside, it’s also just undeniably more convenient to have a single thing we need to carry with us when traveling – when my iPhone is my wallet, passport, visa, and any other identity document I might require. I got a small taste of this when I was able to obtain my Irish citizenship after Brexit, thanks to having had the foresight to choose a grandfather born in Ireland. Like the US, Ireland offers the option of a passport card as well as a passport book. Also like the US, the card can only be used for limited forms of travel, but it can be used for all EU countries. Being able to carry this in my MagSafe wallet and not have to carry a bulky passport when travelling in Europe feels almost like cheating the system! A small step, but an important one The very limited support for the feature means that it’s not a big step in itself, as noted above. It’s US only. It can’t be used for international travel. It won’t be accepted at all airports. However, I do think it is an important first step in the direction of global support for digital passports. Once people get to experience the convenience and peace of mind, I think it will create demand for wider support. Initially, for widespread acceptance across all US airports for domestic travel, but I think it will also lead people to want to be able to use a digital passport internationally. Politicians around the world will hopefully take note. To be clear, I don’t think this is going to happen anytime soon. The EU, for example, has been talking about digital passports for a great many years and still hasn’t made any significant progress. If I were placing a bet, I suspect we’re looking at a decade or more before we can travel with digital passports to even a limited number of countries. But we’ve already seen how this can play out. Apple Pay was hugely influential in the rollout of contactless payments in the US, a country which had largely ignored the technology previously despite its popularity in Europe. Give people a digital payment card in their iPhone and they start demanding that retailers accept it. Give people a digital passport and I think we will see a similar phenomenon, albeit one that will progress at a more glacial pace given the need to convince governments rather than profit-motivated companies. Apple will bring this future significantly closer. Highlighted accessories
