Four years ago I asked whether "Google Pass" was a thing that I needed to give a shit about and consensus was, "no, nobody uses that." But I have heard anecdotally, recently, that this might no longer be true. Thoughts?
The goal here is, "reduce the amount of time it takes for someone standing in front of my nightclub to wave their QR code at the door staff."
Note: I don't use Android and know as little about its ecosystem as possible, so please use small words.
https://jwz.org/b/yk45
If those of you using Android could click on this link and tell me whether it does anything even remotely useful, and if so, some detail about how horrible/stupid the whole experience is, that would be helpful: https://www.jwz.org/images/2026/test.pkpass
And tell me what version you're using, obviously. Possibly this requires some "Play" [sic] stuff to work.
UPDATE: Thanks! You can stop now.
(Unless you have read the dozens of replies and have had a materially different experience than those.)
@jwz it showed it as a download then opened this flow, possibly a couple of other add/continue screens in between.
I didn't accept the long t&c page and it still seemed to work, though I may be blind now since it ramps the brightness to full on the ticket screen.
Will add version later if I remember but need to charge and walk the dog. Samsung Galaxy S8 though so prehistoric hardware.
@jwz nothing remotely useful - I get a dialog as for any unrecognized file for download.
Edit: Android13/lineageOS/google play from microg/fennec browser (firefox)
Ditto download and offer to open on an Android 16 Pixel. In all of Firefox, DDG, Firefox Focus browsers.
I didn't add the ticket to my wallet.
Notably, it was recognized as a ticket without having to put it in an email message attachment to trigger processing (the usual workaround).
Avoiding needing the attachment workaround is what I would consider a usable "add ticket to wallet" process.
So it's a little clunky with too many steps and has some room for human error or people to miss a prompt and have the file left in an oubliette containing all their randomly downloaded files. But it works.
I'm not sure whether or how the process would differ when using a Mastodon client, the Chrome for Android browser, another version of Android OS, etc.
@jwz It downloaded the file and showed the Downloads folder(?) where I could tap on it again. Not particularly helpful.
When tapping it, I could select Google Wallet, which wanted me to agree to something (abort abort abort). I also have PassAndroid installed for this specific purpose and that imported the pass with no problems.
Android 16 on Galaxy S22+, Chrome browser. I'm using Google Wallet for credit cards. Have installed PassAndroid for Pkpass files some years back.
A story in 4 pics. This was as far as I was willing to go without knowing exactly what that file does. (And I only downloaded it because you have earned that trust.)
To clarify, I don't think the file does anything harmful, but I don't know if I want whatever it actually does.
@jwz Google Play Services can ingest the .pkpass file directly and show it in Wallet. This is apparently new as of 2 years ago. It makes you click a few more buttons than the native Google Pass button but it absolutely works.
(It also tries to trick you into downloading an app named "Google Wallet" even though all of this functionality is part of Play Services.)
@jleedev If this were generally true, that would be great news, because it would mean that my existing passes work on Android without me having to do anything.
But I cannot reproduce.
In the Android emulator, clicking on a .pkpass link (content-type application/vnd.apple.pkpass) downloads it and says "cannot open file".
This is Android 16 sending UA "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; K) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/133.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36".
@jleedev I switched the emulator from "Google APIs" to "Google Play Store" and it had slightly different behavior; the pkpass file still shows up in Downloads, and it doesn't say "can't open file" any more but neither does it open it.
There is some crud in "adb logcat" about "com.google.android.gms/com.google.android.gms.pay.deeplink.AliasSavePkPassActivity" so maybe it's trying?
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