Apple Wallet or Google Wallet: what changes for your loyalty card

One customer holds out an iPhone, the next pulls a Samsung out of a coat pocket, the third has a phone whose brand you have never seen. In the middle of the lunchtime rush you are not going to ask each of them what they carry. You do not have to.

Digikart issues both cards. Your poster carries a single QR code. When the customer scans it, their card is created and the page offers the two buttons, “Add to Apple Wallet” and “Add to Google Wallet”: they tap the one that matches their phone. If their phone handles neither wallet, a web card takes over in the browser. The customer installs no app.

In the UK and in Ireland the two camps are almost the same size: Statcounter measured 51.5% of mobile traffic on iOS and 48.5% on Android in both countries in August 2026. So roughly every other regular will hold up an Android phone, and your customers will not all see exactly the same thing. Here is where the real differences are, and which of them concern you.

The essentials do not move. On iPhone as on Android, the card carries your business name, your colours, the customer's stamp or points balance, the reward they are working towards and a QR code for you to scan.

The gesture at the counter is the same on both sides. The customer shows their card, you scan it with the iPhone app or from a browser, the stamp is credited. Your dashboard draws no distinction: you see customers there, not operating systems.

Put another way, everything that makes a loyalty scheme run behaves the same. The differences below are about presentation, and about what the phone does of its own accord.

On iPhone, the card holds the address of a web service. When its contents change, our server sends a silent notification to the device, and the phone fetches the new version by itself. Apple describes this in its documentation: the notification carries no data, it only signals that an update is available, and the customer has nothing to do.

On Android, the card lives on Google's servers. When you credit a visit, Digikart updates the card at Google, and the customer's phone follows. The route is not the same, the result is.

In practice: the customer walking out with their eighth coffee has eight on the card without having opened anything. That is the whole difference from the paper card, which only updates when you have the stamp in hand and they have the card on them.

Apple Wallet displays a file we build for you. Your colour and your business name are there on the free plan. The logo, the banner image, the text colour and the name you give your units (“coffees”, “washes”, “sessions”) land on the customer's screen exactly as you set them, from the Plus plan.

Google Wallet works the other way round. You supply the same pieces, logo, colour, banner, balance, reward, and Google arranges them in its own template. The result stays in your colours and consistent with the rest of the customer's wallet, but the layout is not pixel for pixel the iPhone one.

The practical consequence fits in one sentence: do not judge your card on a single phone. Look at it once on each system, check that your name reads well and that the balance jumps out, then move on. Your customers will never compare the two.

iOS 27 introduced a new presentation for loyalty cards, membership cards and gift cards. Apple calls it “Poster Generic”: a large image fills the card, your name is shown big, and up to two buttons appear just under the card.

At Digikart, those two buttons do something useful. The first opens the customer's rewards page: their balance, their rewards, their history. The second is yours, to order, to book, to show your offers or to call you. The large card is included from the Plus plan. You set it up in My card, with a faithful preview, and switch it on when you are happy with it.

Nobody loses anything along the way. The card file carries both layouts: an iPhone still on an earlier version of iOS keeps the classic card, and on Android the Google Wallet card does not change. Your customers reinstall nothing, the cards already in their phone update by themselves.

This is the least known difference, and the one that causes the most misunderstandings. Both wallets can react when the customer passes close to your business, but not in the same way.

On iPhone, you supply your business address and the text of your choice. When the customer is nearby, their card can surface on the lock screen with your line, for instance “Your loyalty card is waiting for you 👋”. That text is the same for all your customers: it announces your shop, it does not count anyone's stamps. Apple describes this mechanism as passive: nothing rings, nothing forces itself on the customer, the system decides to put the card forward in the right place.

On Android, it is a real notification pushed by Google. It stays on screen while the customer is on site and disappears when they move away. This is the point where Android does better than iPhone: the notification is seen on its own, where the Apple card only waits to be looked at. In return, it reaches only the customers who have allowed notifications and continuous precise location for Google Wallet. And Google states plainly that it decides the distance and the dwell time, and that it writes the text. Yours is not shown.

Worth remembering: the nearby notification, included in the Pro plan, is a timely reminder, not a channel you steer. On iPhone you write the message but the customer has to look at their screen, on Android the reminder is seen but Google writes it.

The customer on iPhone sees a card in your colours, filed next to their bank card, updated at every visit, and able to surface on the lock screen when they walk past your door. If they are on iOS 27 and you have switched the large format on, they see your name in large type and two buttons under the card.

The customer on Android sees the same card, laid out by Google, with the same balance and the same reward. They find their rewards through the links on the card, and Google can remind them you exist when they are outside your shop. The customer with no wallet opens their card in a browser, with the same balance and the same code to show.

For you, nothing changes from one customer to the next: one poster, one QR code, one scan. The only call that is yours is the plan. The free plan already issues both cards, with no cap on customers. The Plus plan dresses the card and opens the large iPhone format, at 17 € including VAT a month, around £15 at today's rate, billed in euros. The Pro plan adds notifications and the nearby reminder, at 49 € including VAT, around £42.