Apple unveiled its newest iPhone yesterday with exciting news surrounding a major update to the onboard near field communication (NFC) capability. The newest iPhone natively supports reading NFC tags in iOS 12 and will open NDEF URLs in Safari finally! After successful Apple pay deployment, it’s time to stretch the NFC chips’ legs.
Vigor Smartech have been at the forefront of NFC card and tag production for several years, this development really opens the floodgate for NFC print. For years we’ve had to include QR codes on our NFC cards for apple users, this move by Apple will bring NFC technology and impressive customer experiences to the foreground.
Let’s get technical
NFC is a subset of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), learn more in our article RFID vs NFC.
For those in the know, iPhone will now read all NFC Forum 1 to 5 tag types, for us that’s mainly NXP NTAG21x and Ultralight EV1 with no third party app, just Safari. If you do have a third party app, like Nike’s awesome connected shoes, it will listen real time for NFC tag events and enable richer digitally based experiences. This is all made possible via Apple’s Core NFC tech, some NFC tags and NFC Data Exchange Format (NDEF) encoding. A significant ‘in your face Android’ is iPhone can even read NFC tags from the lock screen, following approval from the user. The major drawback is only the new iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max and iPhone XR will be able to take advantage of this update to the company’s Core NFC specification to read NFC.
Take a look at this video from Apple for more detail.