How a wallet pass surfaces itself near your branch

It's relevance, not a push notification

A wallet pass carries a short list of coordinates inside the pass file. When the phone decides it's near one of those coordinates, the operating system offers the pass to its owner: a card on the lock screen, or a suggestion in Apple Wallet or Google Wallet. At that moment nothing is sent from Waya's servers, and nothing is sent from your dashboard.

That single architectural fact explains most of what follows. There's no delivery receipt, so nobody can prove to you that it fired. It draws down no part of your monthly wallet-message allowance, because no message is sent. And the customer's location never leaves their phone, so neither Waya nor you can see where anyone is standing.

The mental model worth holding: you aren't messaging the customer. You're telling the phone where this card becomes useful, and the phone picks the moment.

Passive relevance versus an active app geofence

The active version is what a big retail chain's app does. The customer installs the app, the app asks for "Always" location access, it registers regions with the operating system, and it fires a real push notification when a region is crossed. It can log the crossing, choose the send time, test two versions of the copy, and count who walked in afterward.

Passive wallet relevance gives up every one of those controls. You don't pick the moment. You get no open rate. You get one line of custom copy at most, and only on Apple Wallet. In exchange, the customer installs nothing, grants no permission to you, and cannot be followed around.

Which model you should want depends on one question: do your customers already keep an app of yours installed? A barber with 400 regulars will not get 400 app installs, and neither will a two-branch coffee shop. For those shops the passive model isn't a compromise, it's the only version that exists in the real world.

What Apple and Google each read out of the pass

Apple Wallet reads a `locations` array on the pass: latitude and longitude entries, an optional `relevantText` line per entry, and a `maxDistance` value in meters. Waya writes up to 10 coordinates into each pass, which matches Apple's own cap of 10 relevant locations. If your shop has more than 10 branches, the extras simply aren't in the file.

`maxDistance` is a ceiling, not an instruction. Apple compares your number against its own internal default and uses the smaller of the two, which is why setting 500 meters doesn't guarantee a 500-meter trigger. In Waya the radius control runs from 50 to 500 meters in 50-meter steps and defaults to 150 meters.

Google Wallet takes a plain list of coordinates on the loyalty class. No radius setting, no custom text: Google decides both the trigger distance and the wording it shows. So the same card can display your tailored sentence on an iPhone and a generic card suggestion on an Android phone. Write the copy knowing a large share of your customers will never read it.

Accuracy and battery, without the marketing

This is coarse geography, not turn-by-turn GPS. The operating system leans on cell towers and Wi-Fi networks to decide "near," which is cheap in battery terms and imprecise in distance terms. Expect the trigger to land somewhere in a wide band around your pin, and expect lag: sometimes the pass appears minutes after the customer is already inside.

Pick the radius to match the building, not your optimism. A street-front shop with parking outside works well at 150 to 200 meters. A unit inside a mall usually needs 300 to 500 meters, because indoor location fixes are weak and the customer enters the building long before they reach your door. At 50 meters the reminder mostly never fires; treat that setting as off.

Battery cost is close to zero, and the reason is structural. Nothing of Waya's runs in the background, because there is no app to run. The phone is already monitoring regions for every pass, ticket, and boarding card it holds, and it batches that work. Waya's location panel tells merchants to expect at most one appearance per customer every 4 hours, and the operating system may show it less often than that.

The customer can also switch the whole thing off, and some have. iOS has per-pass controls for lock-screen suggestions and automatic selection, and system Location Services has to be on at all. If your test phone shows nothing, check those two before you conclude the pass is broken.

The branch setting that silently switches it off

The most common failure has nothing to do with radius or copy. It's filling in the wrong address field. The card designer has its own Address and Maps fields, and those exist for a human reading the back of the card. They are not the geofence. The geofence is built only from branch coordinates saved on the Branches screen.

When no branch has coordinates, the coordinate list comes out empty and the pass is built with no location block at all. Nothing errors, nothing warns you, and the toggle in the location panel can sit there switched on the entire time. You get the identical silent result the other way around: perfect branch coordinates saved, toggle off, no locations in the pass.

The second trap is timing. Coordinates are written into the pass file at the moment it's built, so passes already living in customers' wallets keep the old list until they next update. Fix the coordinates, then cause an update. An Apple pass fetches a freshly built file from Waya when the wallet checks in, so stamping one real customer is the fastest honest way to see the new geofence reach an installed card.

On the free plan you get one branch, which is enough for a single-location shop: one accurate pin is the whole configuration. Growth covers 3 branches and Premium is unlimited, but the 10-coordinate pass cap still applies to what Apple will read.

Setting it up and testing it so the result means something

Start on the Branches screen and drop the pin on your actual door. Not the mall's center point, not whatever a place-name search returned, not the plaza across the road. Then open the location panel, switch it on, set the radius against the building type, write one sentence of copy, and choose your sending hours so nobody gets nudged toward a closed shop.

Test it with your own card and real distance. Install the pass, then genuinely leave: a kilometer or more, and give the phone time to settle somewhere else. Come back and watch the lock screen, not the notification list, because this isn't a notification. If nothing appears after two honest attempts, widen the radius before you touch the wording.

Two things will waste your afternoon if you skip them. Toggling settings while standing inside your own shop proves nothing, because the device has already decided where it is. And a pass minted before your change won't carry the new coordinates until it updates, so test with a freshly enrolled card if you want a clean answer.

When this is worth turning on, and when it isn't

Location relevance earns its keep in impulse-repeat categories: coffee, a lunch counter, dessert, a car wash, a barber near an office district. The decision is small, the customer is already outside, and the card appearing at the right corner is a genuine reminder rather than an interruption.

It's much weaker for anything booked in advance. A clinic, a salon appointment, or a service someone schedules a week out isn't helped by "you're nearby," and the same nudge can read as noise. For those shops the useful wallet mechanic is the update after a visit, not the one before it.

The last piece of honesty is measurement: you can't attribute visits to this. There is no geofence report in the dashboard, because no event ever reaches our servers to report on. Judge it by overall repeat behavior over a couple of months, and treat it as ambient reminding that costs you no wallet messages, not as a campaign channel with numbers attached.