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

@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".

@jwz If I had to guess, the emulator system image being "Google Play" or "Google APIs" has something to do with this; I'm on Pixel 4a with Android 13.

@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?

@jwz @jleedev
If you share a pkpass file (for a fictitious event), some of us will tell you whether it imports into Google Wallet on our phones, with what phone and what Android version.