I just bought some tickets online for a local event in Barcelona. I purchased them from a specialized ticket selling site so I was expecting them to send me some tech-savvy ticket system that I could link with the iOS wallet app.

Instead, they just sent me the classic PDF with the tickets. I’ve always wondered why iOS tickets don’t seem to really catch on, they are extremely convenient for the user. With a small link I can have all my tickets in the same place and not forget about them. On the other hand, PDF files are easy to lose and forget about.

In a similar manner, the only company which fidelity card I’ve been able to set up into the Wallet app is IKEA’s. I’ve tried scanning other barcodes and looking for links into websites, apps, with no luck at all.

I decided to take a look at the process of generating a ticket from a developer perspective and turns out it’s way too complicated. The process involves certificates, an Apple Developer account, Mac OS development… yadda yadda.

This is perfectly fine for an airline company but what about medium-small businesses? Why would a smaller company bother at all? For something that should be just throwing a bunch of metadata into a JSON (which any monkey with a computer can do), you now suddenly need an (expensive) expert Apple developer, with an expensive computer, just so you can make the process slightly more convenient for your users.

It’s no wonder nobody cares about it and iOS’s wallet can’t succeed until Apple accepts this reality. I’m sure Apple wants something like “all tickets into Wallet must be certified and 100% trusted so nobody gets scammed” or something like that, but it entirely defeats its purpose if the process is so complicated nobody ends up using it.