Covid-19 Vaccine Passes
Late last week (2021-12-03) New Zealand moved from its 2020 "Alert Levels" system (which were constantly tweaked), to the to the Covid-19 Protection Framework, which rapidly got nicknamed the "Traffic Lights" system (archived copy), due to the poor choice of initial colours for regions (Red / Orange / Green; but "Red" means "stop" less than Alert Level 3/4 did, and "Orange" does not mean "prepare to stop", and "Green" does exactly not mean "proceed" either; perhaps they should have chosen different colours....).
The main feature of the Covid-19 Protection Framework is that basically all businesses can operate at all levels (with some capacity limits in "Red") if they choose to check "My Vaccine Pass" (archived copy) and ensure that both staff and visitors are fully vaccinated for Covid-19.
This naturally resulted in a lot of New Zealand businesses choosing to require Vaccine Passes for entry, including many hospitality and entertainment businesses (the core aim of the Vaccine Pass system) as well as many other businesses (eg, I have had "Vaccine Pass required" notifications from Data Centres, Research organisations, etc). The only businesses explicitly not allowed to require Vaccine Passes are "essential retail" (supermarkets and pharmacies, basically); other retail does not have the same number limits as hospitality/entertainment so does not need to check Vaccine Passes, but several of them are choosing to do so anyway.
Which means most vaccinated New Zealanders wanting to have a "normal life" will need to have their Vaccine Pass close at hand to show regularly.
For those with current vaccination status, Internet access, and an electronically verifiable New Zealand Government issued ID (basically NZ Passport or NZ Driver's License), the process to get a "My Vaccine Pass" online at "My Covid Record is fairly simple: create an account with an email address, verify the email address, connect the account to your "real world" identity by entering details from your NZ Government issued ID, and then request your Vaccine Pass to emailed to you. (Those without current NZ Government issued ID have a much harder time and might need assistance via the phone helpline and/or an in person visit somewhere like a Covid-19 vaccinating pharmacy; that part of the roll out seems to have been less well handled.)
What arrives in the Vaccine Pass email is:
an A4 sized PDF to print out, and cut out a "wallet sized" Vaccine Pass square from the middle of it
a link to "add my Vaccine Pass to Apple Wallet"
a link to "add my Vaccine Pass to Google Pay" (ie, on Android)
all of which contain a QR code that is the actual Vaccine Pass, and some printed text around it to help recognise whose Vaccine Pass it is supposed to be (the authoritative version of those details is included in the QR code, which is signed; see the NZ Covid Pass specification for details on how the signing works). (There's also an official app to verify the Vaccine Pass QR codes, although weirdly use of it is optional, which is disappointing as the entire Vaccine Pass is the QR code and that is not human verifiable; the surrounding text is just metadata to help identify whose pass you are looking for if you are holding several, eg for your whole family.)
Unfortunately the critical QR code is presented very small (about 24mm x 24mm on paper, and 19mm x 19mm in the Apple Wallet version on my phone), and contains a lot of detail (81 x 81 QR code in about 20mm square, so around 4 dots per millimeter!), which is likely to make it more difficult to scan in non-ideal conditions.
Vaccine Pass on an Apple iPhone
Since it was likely that I'd quickly need access to my Vaccine Pass for an extended period of time (it seems very likely to be needed all of 2022 for instance), I wanted to make it easier to access. The paper copy is in my wallet, but I'd prefer not to be getting that out all the time, so the obvious thing was to make the Vaccine Pass more accessible on my phone too (since I already need my phone out to scan the Covid-19 Tracing QR codes (archived copy)).
The obvious thing to do was to add my Vaccine Pass into Apple Wallet on my iPhone, by clicking on the link in the Vaccine Pass email, which I did, but (a) it is then buried below Apple's solicitation for me to give me my credit card details (for Apple Pay), and (b) the resulting QR code is quite small and might not scan well.
My next step was to:
screenshot the Vaccine Pass from Apple Wallet, and
screenshot the Vaccine Pass QR code from the PDF expanded as much as possible to fill the screen (fortunately it is a vector graphic so scales up well), to give the largest possible QR code to scan for easiest scanning
and then create a "Vaccine Pass" album in the "Photos" app to put those two in, to make them easier to find.
That helped, but finding a specific "Photos" album quickly is also non trivial, so I went looking for a more streamlined solution.
Quick access to My Vaccine Pass on an Apple iPhone
iOS 14 and 15 come with the Apple Shortcuts app, which allows automating multiple steps on the phone, and optionally saving those to the Home Screen behind a "shortcut" icon or to a "Shortcuts Widget".
In particular one Shortcut task is to Find Photos, and another allows you to preview a file, which provides a convenient way to see the results without having to dive into an application.
With some hints on the Internet I came up with a "Vaccine Pass" shortcut, with two action steps:
Apps: Photos: Find Photos: Find all Photos where Album is "Vaccine Pass", sort by Date Taken, Latest First (which I limited to 2 items, as those are the two I care about, and it allows me to add replacement versions into that Photos album as they arrive, without changing anything else)
Documents: Show Photos in Quick Look
and then when that is run, it displays a "quick look" (ie, pop over window) with my Vaccine Pass in both versions, as the screenshots I took earlier.
To make it easier to find you can choose to "Add to Home Screen" and give it a name/icon photo that you will recognise; I called mine "Vaccine Pass", and used the Vaccine Pass screenshot itself as the icon photo as that was fairly recognisable. Then I shuffled that to the front screen of my Home Page to make it easier to find (displacing something I was not using).
Somewhat annoyingly, the Home Screen version pops up an annoying "look at me, I did a thing for you" banner on every access (reminding you it used Photos for you). There is apparently no way to turn this off (thanks Apple, what were you thinking?!), although some people have managed to get a work around involving Screen Time blocking Shortcuts Banner notifications to work (it involves getting Screen Time to recognise Shortcuts is notifying you, and then blocking those interruptions; I never managed to get Screen Time to recognise the notifications were happening, so I could not block them).
While researching blocking the annoying Shortcuts banner notification I discovered that if you run the Shortcut from a "Widget", then you get an animation/tick in the Widget instead of a banner notification taking up the top half of the screen. That seemed like an improvement... but sadly the minimum size of a "Widget" is 2 x 2 icons on the Home Screen, which was a lot of space to give up just to avoid annoying notifications.
Fortunately I realised that I could combine another annoying iOS feature and get something that cancelled out both annoyances: the View Widgets screen, available by swiping right even from the iPhone Lock Screen, contains only widgets (no smaller icons), and I do not use it for anything else, so it was a good location to stash a "Shortcuts Widget" to access my Vaccine Pass.
To set up the Shortcuts Widget on the "View Widgets" screen, on an unlocked phone swipe right to get into the "View Widgets" screen (with the large Widget blocks, including calendar, weather, etc by default), and then all the way to the bottom of that to find the "Edit" button. Clock on the Edit button then the "+" at the top right (to add a new Widget), scroll down the list of options to find "Shortcuts", choose the "1 Shortcut" view (unless you have more you want available), and "Add Widget". Then painfully shuffle the new widget (added at the bottom), up to the top of the "View Widgets" screen so it is actually accessible.
The displayed Shortcut in the Shortcuts Widget uses the name/icon taken from the Shortcut app itself (not the one for the Home Screen), so you may wish to edit the Shortcut to change the colour / icon / name used to make it easier to identify.
(If you can justify the space for a 2 x Shortcuts widget, one possibility would be to create a shortcut that just opens the NZ Covid Tracer app, so that too is accessible from the Lock Screen. For now I have not done that, as the NZ Covid Tracer app has lived on my default Home Screen for months in a very "thumb friendly" location, and by default opens "ready to use".)
Conclusion
The result of all of this is that from the lock screen of my phone (or the left most Home Screen), I can swipe right to get to the "View Widgets" screen, and then there is a "Vaccine Pass" widget right there, which I can run by clicking on it, which will display my Vaccine Pass in two forms ("Apple Wallet" view, and "maximised QR code) that I can swipe between. And using it does not pop up a Banner notification on every use, just a "running" animation and tick.
If accessed from a locked phone, then there is an authentication prompt after you click on it, but it displays immediately the phone authentication succeeds. Which seems like the best "quick access" possible.
Hopefully I now never need to deal with the tiny QR code on the printed paper Vaccine Pass PDF, and it just lives in my wallet as an "emergency backup".
ETA, 2021-12-06: Since it seems to be a FAQ: yes, Apple Pay has a feature you can enable to bring up the Apple Pay Wallet for payments from the lock screen (Settings -> Wallet & Apple Pay -> Allow Access When Locked: Double-Click Home Button / Double-Click Side Button, depends on phone model). And as a side effect of that, if you have Apple Pay configured and that feature enabled, you can use that to find other things in your Apple Wallet, like your Vaccine Pass, from the Lock Screen. If you have Apple Pay configured, that might be as convenient (although you may have to hunt for the Vaccine Pass in the wallet each time).
Unfortunately because that is an Apple Pay feature, it only works if you have given a credit card to Apple to use with Apple Pay; it does not work with Apple Wallet alone (and in fact these days Apple dedicates the whole first page of Apple Wallet to an encouragement to give them a credit card for Apple Pay, making Apple Wallet less useful than it was in previous iOS versions -- ie, you can no longer have a "pass you need to use soon" on the top/front screen when Apple Wallet opens). I have tried quite hard not to give Apple (or anyone else, as much as possible) a credit card they can charge whenever they decide to; so I am very reluctant to add a credit card to Apple Pay just to unlock the "double tap" to open Apple Wallet functionality that Apple choose to hold hostage to providing a credit card.
@jme_nz suggested Accessibilty Zoom as a way to zoom in on the small QR code in the NZ Vaccine Pass Apple Wallet entry, which is a great idea. (You need to enable Accessibility Zoom first: Settings -> Accessibility -> Zoom; then double tap the screen with three fingers to get into the zoom feature. See also more detailed walk through of Accessibility Zoom feature.) I suspect my "Vaccine Pass" pre-zoomed in screenshot is a bit easier to use (just swipe left to move to that entry in te album), but it does require more setup in advance than just turning on the Accessibility Zoom feature.