Future iPhones and Apple Watches could have enhanced NFC chips

Apple is making a “significant change” to the wireless NFC [near-field communication] chip in the iPhone that will allow users to more securely unlock doors enabled with the same technology, according to a report at The Information, which quotes an unnamed “person familiar with the matter.” If true, the tech giant could announce the change as part of iOS 12, which is expected to be previewed at next month’s Worldwide Developer Conference.

Such a move could allow folks to use iPhones for secure interactions such as paying transit fares, opening car doors, send data to transit systems, and unlock hotel rooms. Also, it’s conceivable that such NFC features could also come to the Apple Watch.

NFC is now a horizontal technology like Bluetooth, WiFfi, cameras. It’s available, free and easy-to-use. How we interact with physical and digital items going forward will change forever.

iOS 11, which arrived last year, debuted Core NFC for developers. Using Core NFC, you can read Near Field Communication (NFC) tags of types 1 through 5 that contain data in the NFC Data Exchange Format (NDEF). To read a tag, an app creates an NFC NDEF reader session and provides a delegate. A running reader session polls for NFC tags and calls the delegate when it finds tags that contain NDEF messages, passing the messages to the delegate. The delegate can read the messages and handle conditions that can cause a session to become invalid.

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