> A big part of the reason why these Apple Wallet systems have taken so long to appear is because Apple seems to refuse to integrate with any system that isn’t

> A big part of the reason why these Apple Wallet systems have taken so long to appear is because Apple seems to refuse to integrate with any system that isn’t built using secure cryptography. That's not the issue. Rather, there's an issue of what protocols existing access control systems support, what the iPhone can reasonably expose, and a need for integrating iPhone provisioning into every system, and for the last part, Apple likely hiding this behind some costly MFI certification program. According to Ubiquiti, Apple Home Key integration strictly requires that the lock, reader and "processing unit" is a single combined device installed on the door. If your architectures splits that into two or three devices, then you'll be turned away at the door. There's numerous of these access key types, with different features and requirements. Also, just being NFC doesn't automatically make it fit into the box of a smartphone wallet card. For example, take transit cards that use on-card balances to be able to board a bus in intermittent-connectivity areas. Aliro is an access control standard launching this year which all major players seem on board with. This avoids the integration, certification and gatekeeping headaches. > Broadly, yes, almost all NFC based access systems are insecure and pretty broken To clarify, some NFC based systems just use the card ID, use ancient deprecated card types that have been broken for over two decades, or both. If the NXP NFC Reader app says your fob or card is MiFare Classic, then yeah it's in that category. But higher security solutions also mean no card cloning, so pre-Aliro the vendor would have to go out of their way to get e.g. Apple integration and MFI certification.