Tag: pass

11 things to add to Google Wallet that aren’t your credit card

Digital wallets are becoming a more common option to pay on the go. The concept is simple: why carry a wallet when you can store your credit card on your Android phone? It makes logical and decreases the amount of items to keep track of. Google Wallet goes a step further, allowing you to add goods other than credit cards to your digital wallet. What products exactly?

Boarding passes

Boarding cards are required for airline travel. You need these to get past security, confirm the flight’s departure time, and find your gate. Traditionally, they were paper, but they have recently gone digital, via the airline’s app or a digital wallet. Google Wallet can save boarding passes, eliminating the need for physical boarding tickets. It also refreshes the gate or flight time on the boarding card as soon as it changes, keeping you informed of any changes.

Public transportaion tickets

Public transportation is useful for traveling around, regardless of whatever major city you are in. Each system has its own type of passes, such as monthly passes or reloadable cards. Normally, catching a trip requires a specific app or physical pass, but Google Wallet allows you to store and utilize passes from several major transportation agencies around the United States. Then, you can utilize Google Wallet to travel whenever necessary.

Gift cards

present cards are a popular option to offer someone a flexible present that does not require a specific item. It allows the receiver to select an item that is ideal for them, and gift cards can be pooled to purchase a more expensive item. During holidays or birthdays, you may receive multiple gift cards that are difficult to keep track of. Google Wallet allows you to save all of your gift cards in one location and redeem them later.

Loyalty cards

Most businesses have a loyalty or rewards program in place to provide perks to consumers who return frequently. Sometimes this takes the form of a physical card that is utilized at the checkout. If you have rewards cards from multiple businesses, they might fill up your wallet. Google Wallet can also hold loyalty cards. Google Wallet identifies common cards, adds them, and provides you with an easily readable barcode to scan at checkout.

Driver’s licenses

To be able to drive, you must have a driver’s license, which is the most frequent form of identification used to prove your identity and age. Keeping your license with you at all times is a good idea and occasionally necessary, but it can be difficult to keep track of if you do not want to carry a wallet. If you lose it, finding a replacement can be tough. In several states in the United States, you can keep your license in Google Wallet. It is not available in every state. It will only be offered in Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Maryland, and New Mexico as of March 2025. Hopefully, its availability will increase with time.

Health insurance card

Health insurance cards are another vital piece of information to keep with you at all times in case you want medical assistance. While you can keep the physical card, you can also save it to Google Wallet. While it is not as straightforward as adding a credit card or other comparable item to Google Wallet, you can scan or save it through your healthcare provider. Then you will have all of the critical medical information you need at your fingertips whenever you need it.

Passport

Passports are required for travel and as a means of identification. With Google Wallet, you may use your phone to augment your passport with an ID pass. An ID pass enables Google Wallet to save your passport for use in specific instances. An ID pass cannot substitute a passport in all circumstances, however it can be used in some cases. An ID pass can be used at TSA checkpoints for domestic flights in some US airports. It can also be used as a form of identification in some instances, but keep your actual passport with you in case you need it.

Student IDs

Students need IDs for a variety of reasons, including building access, dining hall meals, and student discounts at specific establishments. If they lose their ID, they may be unable to obtain necessary services. Google allowed the ability to save student IDs to Google Wallet in 64 countries and territories, making them harder to lose and easier to use. Because students are likely to carry their phones with them at all times, having their student ID on the phone is more convenient.

Event tickets

You may attend a variety of enjoyable activities, including concerts, festivals, sports tournaments, and more. You must have a ticket to attend, and most are no longer printed on paper. However, depending on the venue or type of event, you may require multiple applications, which can be difficult to keep track of. Make it simple by adding them to Google Wallet. Google Wallet can store any sort of ticket or event pass, providing you with a convenient, centralized location to find everything you need. When the event is ended, Google Wallet makes it simple to remove the pass, so your app is not crowded with used tickets.

Hotel keys

To get access to your hotel room, most hotels use key cards rather than physical keys. In increasingly modern hotels, however, you can enter your room by tapping your key card. Some hotels let visitors use Google Wallet to store hotel keys instead of a physical key card. It is now limited to Club Quarter Hotels and other random individual hotels, but we want to expand it shortly.

Corporate badges

Many company buildings require badges to enter, which increases security. You must have your badge to enter, and if you forget it, you may be permitted to use a government-issued ID or a company ID instead. To circumvent this, some buildings allow customers to save their pass to Google Wallet on their phone, either eliminating physical badges or providing a backup option. Then simply tap your phone to enter, nothing more.

One app for everything.

Google Wallet is useful for storing and using credit and debit cards, but it can do a lot more. It can also hold other goods like IDs, transport passes, gift cards, and so on.

March 23, 2025
How to store your Covid-19 pass in Samsung Wallet
For Galaxy devices, the Samsung Wallet is the ideal way to save all of your credit cards, loyalty cards, and other cards in one location. However, did you know that you may save your immunization record here as well? You can see how it functions in this brief tutorial from Droid Tools.

If you frequently travel, you are aware of the problem: Each nation on the planet, and even certain states, has its own method for showing the status of vaccinations on mobile devices. Particularly if you currently use wallet apps to store credit card information and the like, practical solutions for keeping immunization passes include Samsung Wallet. Let me quickly go over everything you need to do.
1. Open Samsung Wallet.
2. Tap on Health Pass.
3. Tap the plus sign in the upper right corner.
4. Then select whether you want to scan a QR code or receive a pass from a provider. (The latter currently only works with the IBM Digital Health Pass Wallet).
5. Scan the QR code of your proof of vaccination, or select a screenshot of the code.
6. Confirm the process at the bottom right by clicking Add.
That’s it! From now on, all you need is the Samsung Wallet app to prove your vaccination status. If you open the Health Passport there, the QR code is displayed together with your name, date of birth and vaccination history.
July 27, 2022
Pass SafetyNet on Android after rooting or installing a custom ROM

Google and the community have been playing a cat and mouse game for a long time over evading SafetyNet. The community enjoys tinkering with the software on their phones, which usually starts with bootloader unlocking. However, this trips SafetyNet, causing a number of popular apps to cease working on the phone, some of which are justifiably so because they rely on a tamper-proof environment for execution.

SafetyNet is aimed at app creators, but they can choose whether or not to use it. However, as an ordinary end user, you have two options: give up on Android’s modding potential and pass the SafetyNet compatibility tests, or risk being blacklisted by software publishers. This guide should let you pass SafetyNet even if you’ve rooted or installed a custom ROM on your smartphone.

What is SafetyNet?

Android is built to run without granting the end user any privileged access to the underlying subsystems. If a person with administrative (a.k.a. “superuser”) capabilities on an Android device has similar access to administrative (a.k.a. “root”) permissions on a Linux machine, they can virtually change or replace Android system applications and settings. From the standpoint of an app developer, this means that the device on which their program is operating may be compromised. Some form of abuse detection mechanism should be in place to check the device’s software and hardware surroundings and reassure app developers that everything is fine. This is when SafetyNet enters the picture.

While modding is an important component of the Android ecosystem, security standards sometimes necessitate a high level of rigor in the operating system. The Google Play Services include a set of abuse-detection APIs called SafetyNet. Third-party applications can use the SafetyNet Attestation API to see if the device’s software environment has been tampered with in any way. The API compares the current state of the target Android device and verifies the integrity of the environment against a known’safe’ value on the server-side by checking for things like bootloader unlock status, signs of superuser binaries, and more.

SafetyNet tripping and its consequences

SafetyNet tripping is caused by a series of events that differ from the factory setup of an Android device. Even if you simply unlock your phone’s bootloader and leave the factory-installed OS alone, the SafetyNet check may fail due to a “CTS profile mismatch” (where CTS stands for the Compatibility Test Suite) issue. You’ll almost certainly wind up with a SafetyNet failed status if you root your Android device or replace the base firmware with a custom ROM. As a result, you won’t be able to utilize apps or games on the device that use SafetyNet validation. This is particularly true for banking and other financial apps like Google Pay, which rely solely on the SafetyNet Attestation result and will not accept anything else.

When it comes to games, developers use SafetyNet for assessing the device’s integrity so that they can prevent rogue players from cheating or modifying in-game variables for unfair advantages. Last but not least, you can also come across examples where publishers are simply misusing Google’s tamper detection mechanism for no practical reason, which is why power users want to evade the detection routines.

In a nutshell, the modding community will have to choose between having access to root/custom ROMs/kernels/etc. or their preferred apps and games. This might sound like the end of aftermarket development on Android, but there is hope.

Pass SafetyNet attestation

There is no true universal solution to avoid the inspections because Google modifies the backbone of the SafetyNet Attestation API on a regular basis. Because the limits are based on a variety of criteria, you may be able to get around SafetyNet in a modified environment by faking the most important characteristics on legacy devices, but the same approach may not work on later phones. Because of the ever-changing nature of the anti-abuse API, the aftermarket development community has come up with a number of approaches for passing the SafetyNet tests. However, keep in mind that a general implementation isn’t viable. This is a cat-and-mouse game; one day you’ll be ahead, the next day you won’t.

Google is depending on the security of the phone’s Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) or dedicated hardware security module (HSM) for tamper detection as it moves toward a hardware attestation method. Finding a serious security flaw in a device’s isolated secure environment and exploiting it to spoof SafetyNet’s client-side response isn’t a viable strategy, but there are alternative options.

1. Restoring the original firmware and relocking the bootloader

This is perhaps the simplest way to pass SafetyNet, but it has its own merits and demerits. All you need to do is find the correct firmware for your Android device, flash it, and finally re-lock the bootloader. Of course, you’ll lose most of the bells and whistles of Android modding, but it actually makes sense when you need to use your device in a managed environment with strict security policies or you’re trying to sell your device.

2. Using Magisk

If you own a legacy Android smartphone, Magisk is your best bet to pass SafetyNet without much hassle. Even though the current Canary channel of Magisk doesn’t feature MagiskHide anymore, you can still stick to last stable release (v23.0) and utilize MagiskHide to hide root status from apps. Furthermore, you can install Magisk modules like MagiskHide Props Config to change the device fingerprint in order to pass SafetyNet.

Talking about the Canary channel, the new “DenyList” feature of Magisk is an interesting development, which allows users to assign a list of processes where Magisk denies further modifications and reverts all changes it had done. With an appropriate configuration, it can also be used to pass SafetyNet in some scenarios.

Magisk XDA Forums

Lastly, there’s Shamiko — a work-in-progress module written on top of Zygisk (Magisk in the zygote process). It reads the list of apps to hide from Magisk’s denylist to hide Magisk root, Zygisk itself, and Zygisk modules to circumvent SafetyNet. However, Shamiko can only work after disabling the DenyList feature.

3. Using Universal SafetyNet Fix

Bypassing Google’s hardware-backed SafetyNet attestation technique is a tad bit difficult, but it’s not entirely impossible. The Universal SafetyNet Fix project by XDA Senior Member kdrag0n cleverly accomplishes this feat by forcing the basic attestation over the hardware-backed checks.

Notably, Universal SafetyNet Fix has a dependency on Magisk when it comes to passing the basic attestation part. The developer offers two different builds of the fix: The Zygisk variant for Magisk Canary and the Riru variant for stable Magisk.

Universal SafetyNet Fix: GitHub Repo ||| XDA Discussion Thread

4. ih8sn

In case you don’t want to rely on Magisk to pass SafetyNet attestation, you can try out an experimental add-on named ih8sn. After applying, it can spoof a plethora of prop values in order to circumvent SafetyNet checks like the MagiskHide Props Config module, but there’s no dependency on Magisk in the first place.

The ih8sn tool is maintained by several LineageOS developers, but the LineageOS project doesn’t officially endorse it yet. To know more, take a look at its codebase by following the link below.

ih8sn GitHub Repo

Verification

After applying one of the aforementioned SafetyNet passing methods, you may wish to verify the result. The Magisk app comes with an option to initiate the SafetyNet checking routine right from its main menu, which is really handy. You can also opt for an open source app named YASNAC (short for Yet Another SafetyNet Attestation Checker) to check the status and (optionally) examine the JSON response.

Download YASNAC from Google Play

That’s how you can use your phone to pass SafetyNet. With a little effort and care, you can restore Android’s true modding capability without having to worry about SafetyNet Attestation failures. We’ll be adding more SafetyNet passing ways to this guide in the future, so check back!

April 20, 2022