Last week, our team discovered code in the iOS 27 Release Candidate that revealed there will be a new NFC-based way to redeem Apple gift cards by tapping them on the back of a compatible iPhone, and now a demo of the feature has surfaced.
While the functionality does not appear to be live yet, Karta co-founder David Anderson figured out a workaround to get the new gift card interface to appear on iOS 27 and shared a video of it in action on his LinkedIn page today.
Apple's new gift cards will have fine print on the bottom of the card that says "hold iPhone here to redeem," and then a redemption flow will automatically pop up on iOS 27. You can then proceed to check the balance of the card and redeem it. Alternatively, the fine print says that customers can still visit apple.com/redeem for manual redemption.
Specifically, customers will be instructed to hold the top, rear side of their iPhone near the bottom of the Apple gift card to initiate NFC-based redemption.
NFC-based redemption will seemingly help to combat Apple gift card scams, but we do not have all of the details yet. During the redemption process, Apple will verify that the card is authentic and unspent, according to iOS 27 code. For security reasons, the interface may show "this card has been blocked" or "cancelled" if necessary.
iOS 27 is compatible with the iPhone 11 series and newer, all of which support NFC, so this new Apple gift card redemption method should be widely available. However, the feature has yet to be announced by Apple and we do not know when it will launch.
