Sonato Pass

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.

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

I owned this project end to end: the name and branding (Sonato Pass), the pass design, the in-app Add to Wallet experience, and the backend that signs and issues passes, keeps them updated through Apple’s PassKit web service, and decrypts tap payloads from the readers at venue doors. 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.