iOS NFC Capabilities

[th0mas]

The easiest way for Phones to communicate with the NFC reader seems to be Host Card Emulation. The issue is, iOS can't do this.

We need to research ways of communicating with the NFC reader on iOS.

TODO:

• Research alternative ways of communicating with the NFC Reader on iOS
• Work out a simple implementation for this

[nelsonic]

@th0mas thanks for opening this issue to investigate iOS. 👍
Do you have an iOS device you can work with?

In the first instance we just want the phone to be a passive NFC tag.

We might just give people an NFC Sticker for their phone to get around any limitations. 💭
Also, given that we will have push notification loop for additional security, we could also use an RFID. 🤔
If a notification will be sent to the device then cloning the NFC/RFID chip is somewhat mitigated. 🔑

[th0mas]

@nelsonic I don't have an NFC-enabled iOS device to test on.

Making the phone a passive NFC tag seems to be very difficult/impossible on iOS. It only seems possible to read tags but I'll try and investigate more. An NFC sticker could be a good solution.

[nelsonic]

Ok, let's park the iOS issue for now until we get the first "happy path" working.
But definitely worth investigating further as iOS is still 30% market share in EU and 60% in our team (because devs ... 🤷‍♀️)
I don't mind doing the iOS testing on one of our test devices once we have the Android case working. 💭

[th0mas]

It seems we'll probably have to implement bluetooth beacons to get it working on iOS - it seems to be the current "go to" method.

From my research I think you can set iBeacons to only trigger when they are in a >10cm range so we could achieve feature parity with NFC

[nelsonic]

Yeah, BLE iBeacon seems like the way to go. 👍🏻
I’m still considering the (0.15mm) NFC stickers as a stop gap though.