When Apple revealed a torrent of the exciting changes for developers to iOS at WWDC, ranging from Swift to new APIs, HomeKit, HealthKit, CloudKit to widgets, it was immediately clear to us that it was going to be an exciting summer from a development perspective. The new functionalities would be able to provide amazing improvements to Stocard for our users.
We have decided to share two of these features as a preview into our new iOS 8 version.
Touch ID in Stocard
Many of our users have been asking us if we could add an extra layer of security for their loyalty and gift-cards stored in Stocard by including a PIN protection. We had frequently discussed how we could include a PIN protection to Stocard, while sticking to our mission of making Stocard as fast and easy to use as possible. We never felt that a PIN protection would be viable for the most common use-case of Stocard — scanning your card in the store, as entering a PIN significantly slows down the process.
With iOS 8, Apple has given us the amazing opportunity to leverage Touch ID — the fingerprint reader — to add an optional layer of security, while ensuring that Stocard remains as fast as possible.
With our iOS 8 version, if a user chooses to lock Stocard, she will only need to use her finger to unlock Stocard — in less than a second.
Notification Center widget in Stocard
As stated above, our primary mission with Stocard is to make the process of using your cards as easy and fast as possible.
With Apple opening the Today view in the Notification Center to developers, we knew we absolutely had to include this feature in our iOS 8 update. Clearly, making the cards available without even having to swipe the lock screen and launch Stocard would make life for our users a great bit easier.
So we are excited to introduce a quick-access widget to your most used cards, considerably speeding up the time it takes to use Stocard at the cashier.
In the future, whenever our user is shopping, she can just pull down the Notification Center and access the card she needs that instant.
We are looking to build further exciting functionalities based on these features. Stay tuned!
