Hope for Metro iPhone hope as Nexus urged to make Pop card upgrade

Transport bosses have been urged to finally deliver a “seamless” experience for Apple users who are currently unable to keep Metro tickets on their phone.

A Pop card app allowing customers to buy and store tickets was released for Android phones in 2020, but has remained off limits for iPhones.

That means that many passengers have no choice but to obtain a physical Pop card if they want to access its cheaper travel prices, worth up to £1.60 per day, or be left to pay more expensive rates when buying paper tickets from a machine.

Conservative and Labour councillors in North Tyneside united on Thursday night in calling for Metro operator Nexus to resolve the problem and deliver the upgrade.

A motion from Tory councillor Ian McAlpine complained that the Metro’s payment system “needs further improvement to match the modern experience in places like London and Manchester”.

Nexus has previously explained that the technology required to store a Pop card has only been available to use via Google Pay and not in the Apple Wallet.

However, it told the Local Democracy Reporting Service on Friday that Apple is now planning to roll out the tech to its UK devices and that the Metro wants to become an “early adopter” – with plans to upgrade Metro station gates in 2025.

David Bartlett, head of multimodal smart ticketing at Nexus, said: “We remain committed to rolling out Metro’s mobile smart ticketing offer to Apple iPhones. We want more customers to enjoy Pop Pay As You Go on a wide variety of digital wallets, such as those on Apple devices.

“Although available in other countries, products such as Oyster and Pop cannot currently be stored in the Apple Wallet. However, Apple has announced its intention to bring that functionality to the UK. We hope to be an early adopter of this technology when it becomes available.

“An upgrade to our ticketing and gating systems will be required in order to achieve this. This includes new smartcard readers for our gates and validators. This stage of the project is in progress, and we expect the new readers to be installed during the first half of 2025.”

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Metro passengers are also not able to tap in and out at stations using contactless credit or debit cards, whether physical or digital, as users of the London Underground and Manchester’s tram system can.

Coun McAlpine’s motion, passed unanimously by the council, warned that people are increasingly reliant on digital wallets and that the lack of iPhone access leaves some passengers paying “over the odds due to the necessity in many cases to purchase physical tickets at machines”.

He added: “As well as having to queue every journey to use the machine, they also have to know in advance whether or not they’ll be making a return journey. POP cards remove this complexity because the resident always benefit from the lowest, capped, fare.”