Benjamin Mayo
Package delivery and order tracking is one of the new features coming to the
Wallet app in iOS 16. This is technically in the betas now, but no merchant
partners have released support yet, so it's essentially unusable. Hopefully,
we'll see something alongside iOS 16's release in the fall; presumably, the
Apple Store app will support it so you can track your new iPhone on your old
iPhone.
However, Apple recently published sample payloads as examples in its
developer documentation, which gives us our first look at the UI in action.
When the system is live, after making a purchase at a supporting retailer,
you first need to add the order to the Wallet app. This can happen
automatically if you buy the product on an Apple device itself - the
merchant's website will push the order info into your Wallet. You can also
add orders manually by clicking on a link.
Updates to the order are then pushed automatically to the user's Wallet app.
Supporting partners will also be able to configure push notifications to
send when details about the order changes.
The order screen can be very richly detailed. A delivery will show its
status, tracking status, summary a link to tracking, expected date of
arrival, a list of items in the order with thumbnails, and more.
It incorporates a button to view a scannable barcode to present at pickup as
well as the address with a one-tap action to navigate to that address in
Maps.
Orders are saved in the Orders screen and synced through iCloud in the
Wallet app so you can find them later, even months down the road. The entire
process is private by design, and data is synced using end-to-end
encryption, so Apple doesn't know what your orders are.
Generating order payloads that can be viewed in the Wallet app naturally
requires coordination on behalf of the merchant to communicate with Apple's
back end. It remains to be seen how many companies will adopt the feature.
Apple has announced partnerships with Shopify, Narvar, and Route e-commerce
platforms, so hopefully that will jump-start the rollout. They have pledged
to roll out Wallet order tracking integrations later this year.
At the very least, you can surely expect that the Apple Store app will be
updated alongside iOS 16 to support this feature. This will mean that you
can track the progress of your fall Apple hardware purchases directly in the
Apple Wallet app.
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