According to the Information, a subscription-based digital media company, Apple has made a giant step in iOS 12. It is quite surprising to find out that your iPhone will be able to act as a virtual transit or even a hotel door key. In order to implement such big plans, Apple has given some third-party developers the complete access to the near field communication chip inside iPhones. This chip, that detects and then enables gadgets in close proximity to communicate without the need for an internet connection, was introduced in iPhone 6 for the first time.

The iOS 11 release brought developers CoreNFC, which is a powerful tool that makes apps more interconnected with the outside world. By using this CoreNFC framework, users can easily read NFC tags of types 1 through 5 that contain data in the NFC Data Exchange Format.

Just imagine that you will be able to turn your iPhone into a secure hotel room keys. All you got to do is to tap your phone on a door lock. And voila – you are in your hotel room! Now you know how Apple Pay works. The most important thing is that you shouldn`t have any special apps. When you will hold your iPhone near the contactless terminal, it will wake up automatically. It is interesting to find out that Apple employees are already taking advantage of all these features because they began to use their iPhone to access Apple Park.

Thanks to the NFC chips, third-parties will be able to work together with the secure enclave that is embedded inside the iPhone. Such coordination will help keep confidential information in secret. Some hotels have already enabled such contactless activation of iPhone with the use of low energy Bluetooth protocols. However, it is not as secure as NFC.

What is more, Apple is going to replace transit cards with this iPhone NFC technology. These plans have already been discussed with Cubic, corporation that provides world-class services in transportation, security, and defense. In the UK, you can already travel on the Underground without any problems just by tapping your iPhone on the contactless terminal. It`s just a pity that we couldn’t find the ability to read NFC tags among the iOS 10 features.

We hope that at WWDC that will be held next month we will find out more information on this topic.