Windows Phone 8.1 Is Somehow Working With Apple’s Passbook ⇥ imore.com

Well-spotted feature by Tom Warren, as reported by iMore’s Rene Ritchie:

Passbook passes are just collection of data that get rendered into a card and displayed in Apple’s Passbook app. Think of the Passbook files like the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript data that makes up a webpage, and the Passbook app like the browser that renders the actual page. It looks like Windows Phone 8 is taking the same data and rendering a similar card out of it, and then pushing that card to Microsoft Wallet.

Apple could obviously change the PassKit format to block what Microsoft is doing here, and I think they have fair grounds to do so, but I hope they don’t. There are loads of Android apps that support the .pkpass format, and it’s become a de facto standard in the industry. In fact, it’s one of the only standards in the mobile payment solution space.