Apple Wallet as a Backup

The Wallet app is one of the reasons I use my phone more often. For touch payments: when done by phone they don't require a PIN code: faster and more secure. For other card types: mostly as an organizer to have them all in one place. And then for airline boarding passes: not only for convenience, but more importantly as a backup.

Airlines love their branded apps. Some of them are barely usable, just being mostly web views on responsive web pages with (almost) no offline functionality. Some are really good - like the often mentioned United Airlines app. But it turns out even the best ones can fail unexpectedly.

Just last week my United app lost all my flights. Fortunately this was just the app. It was a bit scary moment, but of course GMail is the mother of all backups. So I retrieved the booking confirmation code of my upcoming trip, then manually added the flight to the app and was able to check-in. The check-in went fine and I added the boarding passes to the Apple Wallet.

That was in (correct) anticipation that the flights would get lost again. They were. On the next visit to the United app the "no trips" message was there again and there were no boarding passes either. The usual trick of removing / reinstalling the app did not help. What else can you du but shrug your shoulders in this situation?

Luckily the Wallet is an independent data store / app and when things get lost at the source, their copies are still kept in the Wallet. It has been quite reliable so far, I have not had a single glitch for 4-5 years now since moving to iOS. To the point that I no longer do analog backups.