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Show HN: WalletWallet – create Apple passes from anything

https://walletwallet.alen.ro/
85•alentodorov•1h ago
I got my Apple developer certificate and built a simple app to solve a problem I had. One shop I buy from doesn't have Apple Wallet passes. Since you need signed certificates to build these very simple things, I created a minimal app that signs them. It's available if you need it too. It won't scan cards with AI - you manually enter the barcode, which I think makes it less prone to error.

Comments

081guy•1h ago
This is great! Are you sure you are not violating any ToS for that? I’d hate to see it go
saxenaabhi•1h ago
It probably is violating the ToS. But would like to know more.
jackdh•1h ago
Unlikely, I've used apps similar to this such as passbook [0] for a while now and they're still up.

[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/passbook-wallet-pass-creator/i...

saagarjha•8m ago
Nothing wrong with signing a pass
CraftThatBlock•1h ago
This also works for Google Wallet, you could change the messaging around it to indicate that.
alentodorov•56m ago
nice! don't have an android device to test - did u download it and it worked?
subscribed•46m ago
OK, stupid question, what is the thing this utility does that can't be achieved with scanning a physical pass with barcode or entering the details manually into a Google Wallet?

Because I don't see the.... utility if it?

Unless this achieves something specific I don't know.

pseudosavant•1h ago
This is excellent! Wish the Wallet had this ability built in.
artificialLimbs•1h ago
We’ve been using Apple Wallet (and Google Pay) with bar code scanners with some success, but the bar codes sometimes do not scan correctly and we get garbled or completely wrong data maybe 1 in 20-30 scans. Tried various scanner settings/speeds, etc, no dice so far, and the scanner/pos combo was the one recommended by our processing vendor. Both were among the highest dollar models. This looks like a very cool project!
amaccuish•1h ago
As an aside, I find it really sad that, having a de-Googled Anroid phone, it's actually easier for me to download the Apple Wallet .pkpass files

Anything to do with Google Wallet passes just forwards me to a Google login page.

Semaphor•41m ago
Condor airlines has an "open with Google wallet" link, that doesn't work because I don't have that app. .pkpass files just work with my foss wallet
saagarjha•7m ago
A curious example of a compatibility feature ending up having a much better experience than the thing that they clearly want you to do. Hopefully some Google PM doesn't see this comment and ruin things…
dickiedyce•1h ago
Code39 would be really useful ;-)
corprew•1h ago
Yeah, Code39 would be really festive.
fragmede•1h ago
scanning for barcodes is an easy enough pre-AI computer vision algorithm with OpenCV. AI could "write" that for you!
alessandropier•1h ago
Love the idea, thanks for sharing!

One obvious concern here is data privacy, since the pass details are sent to the server. Any chance it would be possible to run everything in the browser, without sending data back to the server?

alentodorov•59m ago
not really. the .pkpass needs to be signed. you can build the file locally but you won't be able to load it in apple wallet.
alessandropier•58m ago
yeah was expecting that, thanks! do not use my gym pass pls
zeckalpha•39m ago
Please be clearer about this on the site!
matrss•27m ago
The site is pretty clear: "Free and works in browser", "Processed locally", "Private". But apparently the site (sorry for the harsh word, but I can't interpret it any other way) lies.
jimkleiber•57m ago
Maybe a dumb question: if I'm entering a QR code, which info do i put in?
hopelite•43m ago
That will vary. It can technically include any text up to a limit, but most likely it will be a URI, but it could be as simple as and account number. You would want to decode the QR (you can likely do that using your phone camera) and that would be the data to enter.

Ideally this tool would simply use the camera to capture the visual code (bar, QR, etc.) and enter it/replicate it.

alentodorov•32m ago
agree. implemented QR code scanning using the great html5-qrdecode package so scanning happens locally.
ivanjermakov•57m ago
I solved this issue with Wallet Creator: https://apps.apple.com/app/id1486573384

Didn't know it was this simple to just provide a download for prepared file. Is it open source?

hopelite•29m ago
I don’t see it that way. I would rather have a browser based, one-off tool that can generate a .pkpass served up for local “installation”, not installing an app that is necessary to separately manage the passes separately and very well could be tracking its users.
thwarted•26m ago
> It won't scan cards with AI - you manually enter the barcode, which I think makes it less prone to error.

This is a very interesting sentence.

I interpret this sentence as saying that manually entering a barcode is less error prone than letting AI do it, that AI would have an unacceptable margin of error (and this is probably an accurate assessment).

But you don't need AI to find or read barcodes. Finding and reading barcodes is a reasonably mature technology that has existed long before AI.

Barcodes exist as a fast, machine readable data transfer format meant to avoid data entry errors by avoiding manual data entry, and yet you've implemented manual entry in order to avoid errors?

Now, if one of the constraints you've put on your implementation is that it work only in the browser and you don't want to have to download a large barcode scanning library to the browser, then it makes sense to implement manual entry. But that has nothing to do with AI.

That being said, there are some barcode reading apps that can be used to prompt for a scan from a web page, and you get the barcode payload back. I've used an app called "bineye" on Android (source on GitHub) that works like this. This helps avoid error prone manual entry and gets the full barcode payload (many barcodes store/encode more information than the human readable text printed next to them).

alentodorov•13m ago
i should've been clearer: while browsing i found multiple apps that do this. most use AI to extract data from images and are much more feature-rich - you can photo your boarding pass and it goes straight to wallet. however, i noticed that AI sometimes gets details wrong. for example, when i uploaded just a barcode image, it couldn't create the pass because the model also wanted a "name" field.
the_lucifer•19m ago
This is such a quick and neat way to get a pass for all the random codes in your wallet.

I've had a long shelved project (>8 years now?) where I was working on a solution to doing this from a mobile device but with loads more customization (including image options for different slots), but the cost effectiveness thanks to the PKPass signing as you noticed, put me off to provide it as a public utility as I was a student then. This gives me motivation to revisit it.

emodendroket•9m ago
I don’t think I fully understand the use case for this. What would you use the card for?
ms7m•6m ago
A personal use case: my local gym that issues only physical barcode cards -- I used a different app (similar in this style) that allowed me keep it on my apple watch / iPhone instead
emodendroket•4m ago
I see, so this is specifically you have a physical, eg, loyalty card that has a barcode, and you want to use the Apple Wallet?

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