Apple Cash Changes, New Apple Account Card
So far, the visible changes in iOS 15.5 are minor, although there are still some interesting enhancements here. It’s also probably telling that most of the changes are focused on Apple Pay and Wallet features:
- In Messages, Apple Pay has been rebranded as “Apple Cash.”
- The physical Apple Card is now referred to as a “Titanium Card” in Apple Wallet.
- The Apple Cash card in Apple Wallet now includes buttons for requesting and sending money.
- The “iTunes Pass” in the Wallet app is being deprecated and replaced with an “Apple Account Card.”
This last point is particularly fascinating. The iTunes Pass launched a few years ago as a quick way for folks to reload their iTunes account balance by visiting an Apple Store; it was particularly useful for those who preferred to pay for their iTunes and App Store purchases with cash.
However, Apple’s transition to a new universal Apple Gift Card has rendered this mostly obsolete. iOS 15.0 took away the ability to add a new pass, although any passes that were already in your Wallet app prior to upgrading remained in place until iOS 15.4 last month, when they were flagged as “Expired” and moved to the new iOS 15 Wallet section where other expired passes such as event and movie tickets live.
According to code found by 9to5Mac, it looks like Apple’s new strategy will be to replace this with an “Apple Account” card that will act as a payment card, rather than simply a wallet pass. This will allow you to take any balance that you’ve added to your Apple ID and use it to pay for purchases in an Apple Store via Apple Pay.
In other words, the new Apple Account Card isn’t really a replacement for the iTunes Pass. It’s more like the opposite; instead of loading funds into your Apple ID, it will be used to pay for things using the funds already on your account. It may also be possible to use it for loading funds via NFC, but that’s not yet clear from the code.