A while ago Apple Pay just stopped working on my iPhone X. My phone simply hasn’t been detected by any NFC readers I’ve tried. At this point I finally have some spare income and would like to invest in fixing it. I don’t particularly care how involved it is, but I just can’t find any information on where the actual NFC antenna is and if it has the same lock that the face ID sensors do. I’m sorry if I’m just missing some fairly obvious information here. I would just like to be able to use Apple Pay again.
Reddit post
As Express Transit has become standard in the US with the rollout of Apple Pay SmarTrip, Apple Pay TAP and Apple Pay on OMNY, some iPhone X users invariably discover that iPhone X has a NFC problem: Express Transit doesn’t work reliably or NFC fails altogether as experienced by the Reddit user. The iPhone X warranty or AppleCare are expired for most people at this point, getting iPhone X NFC repaired isn’t cheap or easy.
I ran across a Reddit post asking about iPhone X self repair but doing so reads like a nightmare. The device has a unique volume button / NFC antenna cable design that could be one of reasons behind the iPhone X NFC problem. I’ll cut to the chase. My rough estimate is that 40 million iPhone X units were manufactured up to the April 2018 NFC defect fix Revision B iPhone X change over. How many of those 40 million are defective? Only Apple knows. My take is that nearly all of them are defective over time. But iPhone X owners are not aware of defective NFC and degrading reliability until NFC fails altogether.
Unless you like spending time and money repairing the notoriously difficult to repair iPhone X, a repair that may not even work, I strongly urge getting a replacement from Apple if you can, or better yet upgrade to iPhone SE (or any iPhone XS/XR or later). NFC just works and Touch ID is much better than Face ID when navigating the outside world wearing a face mask. You also get A13 Express Transit power reserve and background NFC tag reading that works great with App Clips. Altogether a much better Apple Pay package for our COVID face mask era.
More iPhone X NFC problem posts:
iPhone X NFC Problem
iPhone X NFC Problem: one year later
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