News

Apple Wallet Will Be Able To Store COVID-19 Vaccination Cards

The feature will be available in the next iOS update.

Published

5 years ago

September 23, 2021

David Morelo

Apple

Since the recent public release of iOS 15, iPhone users have been able to store COVID-19 immunizations and test results in the Health app and share them with approved third-party apps. We now know that the upcoming iOS 15.1 update, whose beta version has just been released to developers, will add the ability to store COVID-19 vaccination cards in the Apple Wallet app to present to businesses, venues, and more.

The vaccination information will be stored using the SMART Health Card standard, whose goal is to make presenting this kind of information in a verifiable manner to another party as easy as possible.

Apple

“Organizations that issue SMART Health Cards will soon be able to use a new button to let users know that they can securely download and store their vaccination information in the Health app and quickly add and present it from Wallet,” states Apple on its developer website.

Because the standard is open, there’s nothing stopping any health organization from implementing it to produce a digital proof of vaccination whose verification is as easy as scanning a QR code.

Also Read: Samsung Pay Introduces Support For Digital COVID-19 Vaccination Cards

We don’t know when the iOS 15.1 update will be released, but our guess is that it won’t take too long considering that minor updates are usually spaced approximately one month apart.

The SMART Health Card standard is just one of many examples of how the disruption and challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic have promoted innovation. We can now only hope that it won’t take too long before presenting vaccination information in any form will, once again, be reserved only for very rare occasions.

News

Instagram Now Lets You Tune Its Algorithm, But There’s One Big Catch

The new controls promise users “agency” over their feed, but asking to see more from accounts you actually follow returns an error.

Published

3 days ago

June 11, 2026

Nour Nasir

Instagram

Instagram has expanded its algorithm personalization feature to the main feed, letting users specify which topics they want surfaced more or less often in recommendations.

Instagram chief Adam Mosseri framed the change as a matter of user control. “I believe it’s in our best interest as a business to empower people to shape Instagram into something that works for them, and that people should be able to have a meaningful amount of agency over the products they spend so much time in,” he wrote on Threads.

Though it turns out that agency has limits. The controls only accept interest-based topics, such as “rescue dogs” or “parenting humor”. Requesting “posts from people I follow” returns no results, which is obviously a sore point for creators whose posts rarely reach their own audiences. Mosseri conceded the tension: “Who you follow used to be a meaningful tool people had for shaping their own experience, and as recommendations took over the main feed that tool quietly stopped working”.

Also Read: How To Find & Cancel Pending Instagram Requests

Instagram credits large language models for making its algorithms legible enough to personalize, and says it is “actively working on supporting requests for people, different moods or vibes, content types, and more” – potentially leading to a fully “bespoke” version of the app.