Apple’s T2 chip is challenging to breach, but Apple’s Secure Enclave does have restrictions on the number of cards that can be stored in Apple Wallet. The Secure Enclave is a protected area on Apple’s devices that holds keys, encrypted data, cards, and other security details. It is a separate subsystem on Apple devices designed to keep your secure data safe, even if the main processor or OS is compromised. It was introduced with Apple’s A7 and T2 chips and uses AES cryptography to encode information so that it cannot be read without decryption. The Secure Enclave uses Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) internally to ensure that only your security identifiers can be used to unlock your data. Apple Wallet, Apple Pay, and passes together are known as PassKit, and third-party developers can add PassKit to their apps to manage Apple Pay and passes in the user’s Wallet. Passes can include airline boarding passes, credit cards, bank cards, transit passes, loyalty cards, gift cards, IDs, and other types of passes. Since Apple Wallet uses the Secure Enclave, there is a limit to how many passes you can store on your Apple device before the Enclave’s memory becomes full. When this happens, you won’t be able to add any more cards or passes until you remove some existing ones. If you try to add a new card to Apple Wallet and get an error saying no more cards can be added, it may be because you’ve added enough cards to fill up the Secure Enclave’s internal memory. In this case, you will need to remove some existing cards or passes from Apple Wallet in order to make space for new ones. Apple does not publish a hard limit on how many cards you can have in your Apple Wallet, but most users seem to agree that the current limit appears to be around twenty-five total. If you find your Secure Enclave is full, you can remove cards either from the Wallet & Apple Pay Settings pane, or you can remove them from the Apple Wallet itself. You can also offload transit cards to iCloud using the iCloud backup feature in iOS Settings and add them back to Apple Wallet on another iOS device by restoring from the backup.
Maximizing iPhone Wallet Space for Additional Credit Cards
