So I encountered a strange bug that took me a while to figure out (and completely stumped apple tech support).
I noticed in the last several weeks my iPhone X wasn’t working at Apple Pay terminals around town that it previously had no issue with. I initially chalked it up to flakey terminals at those businesses, until I found that Apple Pay on my watch worked flawlessly at those same terminals.
The thing was, the NFC communication on the iPhone seemed to be broken since tapping on the terminal did not bring up Apple Pay, and if I manually brought up that wallet, chose a card, FaceID authenticated and the held it to the terminal, nothing happened. No error message, no attempt at any transaction. Nothing.
I tried the usual things such as hard reboots, updating phone, trying different cards, removing and re-adding all cards, nothing worked. Finally, I was thinking about any other angles to the Apple Pay process and had the idea to turn off FaceID for Apple Pay so that it would just ask for phone passcode. Lo and behold the NFF chip seemed to get its wake up call and immediately started working! Tapping that phone to terminal brought up Apple Pay and I was able to complete s transaction no problem. Bringing up wallet manually, authenticating card and then tapping terminal also again worked fine.
After that I think I rebooted my phone once again, then turned FaceID for Apple Pay back on, and it’s been working fine since.
Just wanted to post this strange bug in case anyone was left scratching their head like I’d been.
I noticed in the last several weeks my iPhone X wasn’t working at Apple Pay terminals around town that it previously had no issue with. I initially chalked it up to flakey terminals at those businesses, until I found that Apple Pay on my watch worked flawlessly at those same terminals.
The thing was, the NFC communication on the iPhone seemed to be broken since tapping on the terminal did not bring up Apple Pay, and if I manually brought up that wallet, chose a card, FaceID authenticated and the held it to the terminal, nothing happened. No error message, no attempt at any transaction. Nothing.
I tried the usual things such as hard reboots, updating phone, trying different cards, removing and re-adding all cards, nothing worked. Finally, I was thinking about any other angles to the Apple Pay process and had the idea to turn off FaceID for Apple Pay so that it would just ask for phone passcode. Lo and behold the NFF chip seemed to get its wake up call and immediately started working! Tapping that phone to terminal brought up Apple Pay and I was able to complete s transaction no problem. Bringing up wallet manually, authenticating card and then tapping terminal also again worked fine.
After that I think I rebooted my phone once again, then turned FaceID for Apple Pay back on, and it’s been working fine since.
Just wanted to post this strange bug in case anyone was left scratching their head like I’d been.