Before Sonato Pass, getting into a club meant remembering your member number or waiting while staff looked you up. Now a member adds their pass to Apple Wallet once and taps their phone at the door. The tap pulls up the member’s photo and notes so staff can verify who they’re greeting, and the pass updates to show the member number while checked in. It works at a member’s home club and at partner clubs across the Sonato Alliance reciprocal network.

An iPhone showing the Sonato pass in Apple Wallet, tapping a Sonato-branded NFC reader

The tap: a Wallet pass with NFC meeting the reader at the door.

I owned this project end to end:

  • The Sonato Pass name and branding
  • Pass design
  • In-app Add to Wallet experience
  • Pass signing and issuing backend
  • Updates via Apple's PassKit web service
  • Tap payload decryption from door readers

I worked with Apple to secure the restricted NFC entitlement, evaluated NFC hardware partners and their APIs, and partnered with Dot Origin on readers.

The interesting engineering was in the tap interaction itself: giving useful feedback when a tap fails, and handling the long tail of real-world states like poor connectivity, canceled memberships, and members tapping into clubs they don’t belong to, with debugging tools built out for when things went wrong in the field.

Shipped in about a year, alongside my ongoing work on the main Sonato app. Live since May 2025, with members tapping in at club doors every day since: production volume, not a pilot. NFC passes are rare in the Wallet ecosystem.

What partners say

Sonato ensures private club member interactions are smooth, elevated, and personalized, using VTAP readers for check-in.
VTAP by Dot Origin, NFC reader partner

Want a pass like this at your own door? That's a service I offer: Apple Wallet pass development.