Mobile app · Apple Wallet passes
Tessera
The cards the world forgot, finally in your Wallet.
In development · 2026
The problem
Half the cards in a wallet never made it into Apple Wallet — the arcade top-up, the cat-café loyalty card, the local cinema stub, the concert ticket, the work badge. Apple Wallet is effectively closed to normal people: putting a pass in it demands a paid developer account and technical work most people will never touch — and the few tools that manage it run on their own servers, uploading your card’s details to make it work. Tessera closes that gap. It builds a genuine pass end-to-end on the device, so an everyday card becomes a first-class Wallet pass without a backend, a login, or your data ever leaving the phone.
What it does
Tessera turns an everyday card into a genuine Apple Wallet pass. A five-step wizard maps fifteen kinds of everyday card — from arcade and cat-café cards to cinema, concert and sports tickets, flights, hotels, rewards, coupons, gift cards, memberships, work IDs and insurance, plus a free-form custom pass — onto their native Apple Wallet styles, pre-tuning the fields, templates, and barcodes each one needs, so a finished pass takes about sixty seconds. You design directly on a live, Wallet-accurate preview: pick from six curated templates per family, nudge a colour, and watch the pass repaint on every keystroke.
Under the surface, it does something genuinely hard. Making a pass that Apple Wallet will actually accept normally takes a developer account and a server; Tessera does the whole thing on your iPhone — it builds a real, properly signed Apple Wallet pass and drops it straight into Wallet with Apple’s own Add-to-Wallet button. Nothing is uploaded, nothing round-trips through a server. And it isn’t theory: a pass made this way has already been accepted by Apple Wallet on a real iPhone.
Once made, a pass follows you. It shows up on your Apple Watch automatically and feeds home-screen and Lock Screen widgets, including one that fills up as you get near the venue. Pin a place and a time, and your pass appears on your Lock Screen and watch face just as you arrive. Set a card’s expiry date and Tessera quietly reminds you before it runs out — a month, a week and three days ahead — all on your phone, and it never tracks you in the background. There is no account and no subscription: Tessera is bought once and owned for life.
Key features
Built into the system.
Real passes, made on your phone
Every card becomes a genuine, properly signed Apple Wallet pass — the real thing, not a screenshot — built and signed entirely on your iPhone, with no account and no server ever involved.
Fifteen kinds of card, one honest wizard
Five calm steps map each of fifteen kinds of everyday card to its native Apple Wallet style — honest about what Wallet will actually show — pre-tuning the fields, templates and barcode so a finished pass takes about sixty seconds.
Never lose a card that’s about to lapse
For cards that renew — memberships, insurance, gift cards — Tessera can remind you before they run out: a month, a week and three days ahead, then once after. All on your phone, nothing on a server. Renewing makes a fresh pass and keeps the old one — a lapsed card is proof you were a member.
You can’t design a broken pass
Tessera keeps every pass readable for you: as you choose colours it quietly adjusts the background until the text is easy to read at a glance — so customising your pass never turns into a mess.
Design on the real thing, not a guess
A true-to-Wallet preview stays pinned above the controls and updates on every tap and colour change — exactly what you’ll see in Wallet — so the pass you are shaping is the pass you will carry.
The right pass, at the right place and time
Pin a venue and a time, and your pass quietly appears on your Lock Screen and watch face just as you arrive — and it never tracks you in the background.
On your wrist, your Lock Screen, your home screen
Your passes show up on your Apple Watch automatically, and on home-screen and Lock Screen widgets — including one that fills up as you get closer to the door.
Fifteen categories
Each category, its own world.
Every kind of pass gets its own look — its own colours and artwork, and just the details that pass actually needs. The test that matters: you can tell a pass apart from its top edge alone, because that’s all Apple Wallet shows in the stack.
Arcade
Cinema
Coupon
Gift card
Rewards
Flight
Membership
Work ID
Insurance
Tech stack
The tools, chosen with care.
Platform
How it works
In active development, not yet on the App Store — the app is built and working, and the hard part is proven: a pass made entirely on the phone has been accepted by Apple Wallet on a real iPhone. It comes in a warm light theme and a calm dark one, and it deliberately stops at everyday cards — no government IDs, licences or passports; those aren’t Tessera’s to fake. The visuals here are a stylised mock in Tessera’s own look, not screenshots — but the passes it makes are the real thing, signed on your phone, and nothing ever leaves it.
Keep looking