Mobile wallets

A mobile wallet — Apple Wallet, Google Wallet, Samsung Wallet — is the app that holds the cards you used to carry: a payment card, a transit pass, a car key, an office badge, event tickets, and in a growing number of places a driving licence. One app, one tap. And the point of the whole thing: none of it is the real card. It's all tokens and provisioned copies.

#Two very different things live in there

It matters which one you're looking at:

• Tappable credentials go out over NFC by card emulation — payment cards, transit, hotel keys, car keys, office badges. This is real RFID: the terminal thinks it's talking to a card.
• Barcode passes are just a picture on the screen — boarding passes, most event tickets, loyalty cards. A scanner reads your display; no radio is involved. They only look like they belong next to tap-to-pay.

#None of it is the real card

The thread through every tappable credential: the wallet never holds the actual secret.

• A payment card becomes a device account number — a token with its own keys, so the shop sees a number that's useless anywhere else. More in Contactless credit cards.
• An office badge becomes a Seos or DESFire credential provisioned to the phone, and the door checks it like any card. More in Mobile credentials.
• A transit pass, a car key, a hotel key: same shape — a device-bound credential, issued to this phone, that proves itself without ever handing over anything reusable.

That's why losing your phone isn't losing your cards. The token is switched off over the air, the plastic in your drawer still works, and nobody reissues anything.

#Issued and killed over the air

The quiet superpower is provisioning. The credential arrives over the internet and leaves the same way: your bank pushes a card in, your employer pushes a badge, a hotel pushes a room key with your booking — and any of them can revoke it remotely. No card printer, no "hand your badge back on the way out", no posting a replacement.

#How it taps

Each tappable credential lives either in a secure element (a tamper- resistant chip, the way Apple Pay works) or in host card emulation (an app answering, keys topped up from the cloud). Those mechanics are on Phones. Either way, many wallets support an express mode: tap without unlocking, and keep working for a few hours after the battery dies, so a dead phone doesn't strand you at the gate.

Beyond NFC, car keys and some door systems add Bluetooth and ultra-wideband for hands-free unlock — see Mobile credentials and Aliro.