JR East announced 2 new features for Mobile Suica yesterday: day passes and student commuter pass online purchase and renewal support. Day passes are already available for plastic Suica, Mobile Suica support starts March 12. The 4 passes are: Nobiri Holiday, Tokyo Ward Pass, Tokyo Free Pass, Yokohama-Minatomirai Free Pass.
These Mobile Suica passes will not be available at the local station ticket window, they are purchased in a new version of Suica App due by the service launch date. Only regular Mobile Suica or Mobile Suica with expired commute plan can be used for day passes, Mobile Suica with valid a commuter plan attached cannot be used. JR East is promoting the passes offering bonus JRE POINT when purchased in Suica App with a VIEW credit card.
The very next day after the JR East announcement Apple released the first developer iOS 15.4 beta with many new features including Wallet app strings related to transit card commute plans and stored value, such as “Save money with time based or unlimited ride plans.”
The delicious timing is not coincidence: Apple Pay Suica will certainly put these new iOS 15.4 Wallet strings to good use when the new day passes launch. Wallet app currently indicates when a Suica card is a regular type or has a commute plan attached. The addition of Suica day passes require some sort of new Wallet UI indicator.
One interesting aspect of the Mobile Suica commuter pass limitation: the current card architecture only has one area for attachted commute plans, if there is a valid commute plan it must be removed before a day pass can be added. This storage limitation is addressed by Suica 2 in 1 which holds up to 2 different commute plans but even here there is the problem of conflicting commute plan + day pass plan that exist for the same transit region on the same card. There is no way for the transit gate to determine which one to use for fare calculation: commute plan or day pass. Hence the ‘no commute plan’ rule.
Mobile Suica student commuter passes (university or vocational schools) have been around for some time, but purchase and renewal required a trip to the local JR East ticket office to confirm the school issue student ID. From February 13 students purchase and renew Mobile Suica student commute plans in a new version of Suica App after pre-registration and uploading a picture of the student ID for verification via the Mobile Suica member site (that got a desperately needed refresh). Still somewhat of a pain but much better than before.
Imagine how easy it would be if a digital student ID card loaded in Wallet could be used for secure digital confirmation instead of uploading a picture and mailing a paper copy. In time digital ID will hopefully deliver this kind of time saving convenience.
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