How To Use NFC Tags With Your iPhone

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.