Apple Brings Student ID to iPhones and Watches for Six Colleges
Updated October 2:
Campus life just got a lot easier for students at three colleges: On October 2, Apple officially launched the first wave of digital student ID card. Now, students at Duke University and the Universities of Alabama and Oklahoma can use their iPhones and Apple Watches to get into campus buildings and pay for important things like lunch and laundry. According to a press release, the feature will expand to Johns Hopkins, Santa Clara, and Temple Universities by the end of this school year. While the tech giant didn’t add any additional schools to its roll-out list today; we’re keeping our fingers crossed that lots more campuses will get this convenient feature soon.
Previously:
When you’re a college student, your student ID card is your entire lifeline. It allows you to get into your residence hall, it grants you access to buildings including the fitness center, it’s what you use to pay for your meals, and, at many schools, it can even work as a key to your actual dorm room.
And we’ve all experienced that one terrifying moment when we’ve gone to pay for our totally healthy dinner (consisting of grilled cheese and tater tots) and then realized that our student ID card was still sitting helplessly in our room. Which meant that not only was this delicious grilled cheese now very far out of our reach – it also meant we were going to have to stand outside our residence hall until someone trusted us enough to let us in, all so that we could go sit against the wall outside of our dorm until our roommate got home.
But, of course, Apple has caught wind of this problem, and Apple has a solution.
The tech giant just announced that it’s launching digital student ID cards on Apple Watches and iPhones, which students can use to access dorms, gyms, libraries, and more, while also paying for snacks, laundry, and dinners on campus – all by simply holding their watch or phone near a digital reader. The initiative is going to start out at six different college campuses: Duke, Johns Hopkins, Santa Clara University, Temple University, the University of Alabama, and the University of Oklahoma.
Rather than having to download an app, students can simply add their ID cards to Apple Wallet, as well as link them up to Apple Pay. The initiative will supposedly be going live this fall at the six partner universities, but details still remain unclear regarding which iPhone or Apple Watch model students would need to be able to use their digital ID cards, as well as whether or not there will be an Android equivalent in the near future.
The announcement was made by Apple’s vice president of technology, Kevin Lynch, at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday. Lynch said that the new digital student ID card feature was an “exciting” initiative that Apple hopes to “expand to more campuses over time.”
Related: iOS 12 Is Going to Bring Big Changes to Your iPhone
