12/13/19
9:00 am

How To Use NFC Tags With Your iPhone

You can buy cheap NFC tags and use them to trigger Shortcuts and other actins on your iPhone. You can set up a Personal Automation that automatically runs when triggered by touching your iPhone to a tag. You can also write information to tags that can bring up web pages and request other actions from any iPhone or Android user with a recent device.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. In this episode let me show you how you can use your iPhone with these NFC tags.
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So what's an NFC tag? Well they're these little stickers or they could be little cards or just about anything and it has a bit of electronics in it. NFC stands for Near Field Communication and it's technology that allows to use your iPhone with Apple Pay and other systems. But these little tags are the simplest form of this use. You can actually use the Shortcuts app to react to when you bring your iPhone near one of these tags. There are also ways to put data on these tags so your iPhone or somebody else's iPhone automatically reacts to them.
This is a strip of NFC tags I got on Amazon. I think they cost like $6 for ten. You can get them even cheaper if you buy more. There are tons of them. Just search for NFC tags. If you actually hold a flashlight up to the tag they become a little transparent and you can see the actual circuitry inside.  To use them all you need to do is bring it near your phone. This can be a sticker on the wall and you touch your phone to it. The very top part here. They only work within an inch and a half of the tag. Thus the end, the near, in Near Field Communication. 
So one way to use a NFC tag with your iPhone is to create a personal automation in the Shortcuts app. You can have that automatically run when you bring a tag next to your iPhone or your iPhone touching the tag. So let's go into the Shortcuts app and switch to Automations. We can create a personal automation. Then is you go towards the bottom you'll see NFC is one of the options. We'll select that.
Now the first thing we need to do is scan a tag. So I'm going to tap the Scan button there and it's going to say Ready to Scan. Now I'm going to bring this tag right up against the top of my iPhone here and once it recognizes it, it pops up a little Name This Tag. So I'm just going to do a Test Tag name and hit Okay. Then I hit the next button there at the top and now I can add Actions. So let's go and add a simple thing that just starts a Timer. So I'll go into the Clock app here and look at the actions for Clock. I can say Start a Timer. Let's say 10 seconds just as a demonstration. But this could be something for 30 minutes. Say a tag you want to tap your iPhone to then take a nap or remind yourself in 30 minutes it's time for dinner. Something like that. So this could be my 30 minute timer tag that I can tap. Just keep it simple like that.
I'll do Next and you can see it's setup for when Test Tag is detected. Do, Start Timer. Now I can turn on Ask Before Running. So let's make this an automatic automation here. I'll turn this off and now it should work automatically. In order for this to be active I have to hit Done to finish. Now I can return to my Home screen and let's give it a try. In my test if the phone is asleep it doesn't work. It has to be woken up so you have to have some movement because the screen has to be on. But it doesn't need to be unlocked. It will work whether it's locked or unlocked. Let's test it out here. I'm going to touch the tag to the phone and you can see it gives me a notification there that something is running. So now it should be just 10 seconds before the alarm goes off. There you can see the Timer went off and I have the Stop button and I can hear a sound as well.
I can return to Shortcuts here and I can go into the Automation and change what it does without changing the tag. So I can go in here and I can add more things. I can make it do something different. I can have it get a playlist, for instance, and play it. I can have it send messages. I can do anything I could do in the Shortcuts app. I can have triggered here. I can also simply add Run Shortcuts. So I can have an existing Shortcut and have this Shortcut here simply run the existing Shortcut. So the existing one could also be linked to say a Siri command or a Home screen button and now I add this personal automation that will run it when I touch the tag.
Now one of the big advantages here is that these can run automatically. If you've been playing around with personal automations one of the disappointments is you can't set one triggered by a location or by a time to run automatically. They will ask you for permission. You still have to take that extra step to actually have it run. But with these tags it runs automatically because you're already taking an action by touching your phone to the tag.
So you can do things like having one by the front door and you touch your iPhone to it and it turns off or on the lights in your house. You can have one in your car that when you touch it it starts playing your playlist. You can have one by your office door that when you leave it will text somebody that you're on your way. 
Now a second way to use NFC tags is to store data on the tag. When you do that in a certain way it can trigger a phone to take a certain action. It doesn't have to be something that you programmed into your phone before. So it's your phone or anybody else's phone. For instance you could store a webpage URL on a NFC tag. If somebody touches their phone to it, if they have NFC on their phone, it will then prompt them whether or not they want to open up that page. There are other things you can do as well. 
You need to grab an app to do this.  If you can search for NFC in the App Store you're going to come up with a ton of stuff. I grabbed this one because it's mostly free but I didn't really compare it against others so I don't know if it's the best. But it will work for the purposes of my demonstration. So when I go into this tool here I can do a bunch of different things. I can Read a tag. I can Write to a tag. Let me write to a tag. Here I have to add record. So I can add various bits of data to the tag. Now tags have different amounts of memory. So if you're going to put a lot of stuff on a tag you may want to pay attention to what type of tag you buy. Whether it can store a lot of bytes.  If you're going to do something simple it probably doesn't matter. 
Let's add a record and you can see all these different things that you can add to the tag.  You can add a piece to text. You can add an URL. You can add a link to a file, an email, contact, phone number. All sorts of things. These will all trigger different things on your phone. Let's do the simplest one and add an URL. Then I'm going to just put a simple URL in here. Then I'm going to tap the okay button at the top. So now I'm all ready to write to this. So I'm going to tap the Write button here and it's going to say Ready to Scan. I'm going to take the tag and put it up against it. Watch what happens when I touch the phone to this tag. It's going to come up with this little alert at the top and I can tap it and it will go to this webpage. 
Now if I want to change what the tag does I'm going to have to change things. I'm going to have to go back and you can see there is Other and I can Erase the tag. Then once I've erased it I can write different things to the tag. In this app what you're going to write stays there. So I can actually program several different tags to it. There's also the ability here to add a WiFi network. You can give the authentication there. So in other words the password for the WiFi network. So what I plan to do is program one of these tags with my WiFi network for my house and put it right by the front door. The next time a guest comes over and wants the WiFi password all I've got to do is tell them, Touch your phone to this tag. It will instantly set their phone up with my WiFi network.
So there are a lot of different things that you can do with these tags. If I had a store or coffee shop I could see having one of these setup with an URL to signup for my newsletter and people could just touch their phone to it when they checkout and it takes them to that page and they can enter their email address. You could also use the email record there for customer feedback. So it automatically starts them up with an email sent to you with a certain subject. All they need to do is type the body text and hit Send. You can also use the location tag there and they could tap the little alert that shows up and it takes them to a location on the map. So you can actually get a bunch of these and setup a fun scavenger hunt for your friends where they go from location to location looking for one of these and getting the next location from the tag.
So there are a lot of fun things that you could do with NFC tags. Either setting up a shortcut to have one of these work for your phone specifically or setting up one that triggers an action on anybody's phone. Now I should note that you need a fairly recent iPhone to use NFC tags. They work on the iPhone 7, 8, 10, or 11 models. Programming them with things like URLs, locations, or WiFi passwords should also work for most recent android phones.

Comments: 17 Responses to “How To Use NFC Tags With Your iPhone”

Robert

5 years ago

I guess the keyring/key fob works the same way as the stickers.

John Carter

5 years ago

Once again, more stuff to tinker with. That is SO neat! But the one thing I won't do is put a tag outside my front door to give anyone access to my Wi-Fi network. Hello! Here's a neat way to break into my Wi-Fi network. No password needed! Or, hey, put one by the door lock to unlock the door. Now, can you program the chip to request a password? That would help.

Gary Rosenzweig

5 years ago

John: Oh no, you would put the tag inside your house, by the door, so when people come to visit they can use it.

Phyllis Steele

5 years ago

I'm interested in trying these NFC tags. On Amazon, I wasn't sure which ones would be OK. Some info specifically stated they might not work with iPhones. I have an iPhone 11Pro. I'm guessing the warning was for earlier models of iPhones. I'm ignorant about things like, "compatible with Amiibo and TagMo." If it's OK, let me know which ones you purchased. Thanks, as always, for your help. My Patreon money is so well spent!

Gary Rosenzweig

5 years ago

Phyllis: Yes, a lot of them say they don't work with iPhones in their descriptions, but that is old info. I got the NXP NTAG 215 NFC Tags. But I think any should work with the iPhone 11. I think those other things often mentioned are either apps or small devices.

Phyllis Steele

5 years ago

Thanks, Gary. That's a big help.

Robert Primmer

5 years ago

Nice video! I tried creating Wifi NFC tag. The write tool works but it iOS 13 doesn't seem to react to tag.

reddit thread claims it's not supported yet on iPhone (https://www.reddit.com/r/shortcuts/comments/daugzx/did_anyone_share_guest_wifi)

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level 1
delusionald0ctor
1 point
·
3 months ago
iOS doesn’t react to Wifi or Bluetooth NFC tags unfortunately, apps can read and write to them but if you try to scan a Wifi tag or pair with Bluetooth over NFC nothing happens.

Gary Rosenzweig

5 years ago

Robert: Except it does. I'm doing it. I show it in the video. So clearly there is some other issue at play there in that case.

Robert Primmer

5 years ago

Okay -- I must be doing something wrong then. I can get other actions to work with NFC tag and can connect to WiFi via QR code, but haven't been able to figure out how to do the same via the NFS tag.

Harvey Specter

5 years ago

Gary Rosenzweig: Except you didn't show WiFi/Bluetooth tags working in the video, which actually would've been nice. You merely stated that you "plan" on making use of this feature. This part was what had me most excited, so as soon as I get my hands on a tag, I'll try it out. Not being very optimistic though, as I've read more than once that this isn't working on iPhone yet.

Gary Rosenzweig

5 years ago

Harvey: I works, I've tried it. A lot of people with old posts from older iPhone and before iOS 13 wrote that "it doesn't work" but it definitely does with the iPhone 11 series at least.

Harvey Specter

5 years ago

Gary: I tested it just now. Works with Android, doesn't work with my iPhone (XS Max running the latest iOS), all other background NFC tasks work though, so this definitely isn't a hardware limitation. I also checked with Apple's documentation on NFC, and it doesn't list WiFi networks as a compatible data type. I'll believe it when I see it.

Bill Williford

5 years ago

Gary what app did you use to write your NFC tag to make the WiFi configuration work? I have an 11 Pro Max and am using NFC Tools and it will not read the tag after it writes it. I'd love to get that working.

Gary Rosenzweig

5 years ago

Bill: That's the one I have too. Keep experimenting.

Bill Willo

5 years ago

Hmmmm well the option is there for writing a WiFi tag and that’s what I picked not sure what else I can do differently. Oh well.

Bill Williford

5 years ago

Gary, what kind of NFC tag are you using? Maybe that's the issue some how? Grasping at straws here.

Bill Williford

5 years ago

Nevermind I see above where you said 215's. That is what I am using as well. Guess I'm just stuck.

Comments Closed.

How To Use NFC Tags With Your iPhone

Comments: 17 Responses to “How To Use NFC Tags With Your iPhone”

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