Can an Apple Wallet pass be animated? No, a Wallet pass cannot move.

Apple’s PassKit guide names each image by its file: background.png, footer.png, icon.png, logo.png, strip.png, thumbnail.png. Each is scaled to fill its allotted space; nothing about playback, frames or duration appears anywhere in the format. Three consequences:

• A GIF is simply not read. Wallet looks for strip.png. A file called strip.gif is not that file, so Wallet ignores it, and a GIF renamed to .png is not a PNG.
• An animated PNG gets no animation. An APNG is a PNG with extra frames, which is why it passes a file check. Apple documents no support for animated PNGs in passes, so the most you should plan for is a still.
• The signature fixes the files. Every file is hashed into manifest.json and signed. The images cannot change on the phone; only a new version of the whole pass can replace them, which is the route covered below.

Wallet does draw one effect of its own: a gloss across the strip image, controlled by suppressStripShine. It is Apple’s effect, on or off, not something you can animate.

Google Wallet. Badge, a platform that issues passes to both wallets, says in its design guide that “Apple Wallet does not support animated images; Google Wallet does”, and offers a separate GIF cover image for Google Wallet only. Google’s own brand guidelines list PNG as the preferred type for its images and say nothing about animation either way, so treat the GIF route as something to test on a device rather than a documented feature. Either way it is a Google Wallet behaviour: a pass designed around a GIF will be still in Apple Wallet.

Apple’s poster layouts. At WWDC24 Apple introduced a poster-style event ticket with full-bleed artwork, and in iOS and watchOS 27 it extends the idea to membership, loyalty and similar cards with the Poster Generic style, “designed to highlight prominent artwork”. They are more striking, but the docs describe no animated artwork in either.

• Poster event ticket. Apple’s requirements are the posterEventTicket entry in preferredStyleSchemes and a set of semantic tags, including the event name, venueName, venueRegionName and venueRoom; miss one and the pass falls back to the ordinary event ticket. Apple also states that “poster event tickets aren’t compatible with tickets that require a QR code or barcode for entry”. That leaves NFC, and adding NFC to a pass “requires a special entitlement issued by Apple”. For a business card, whose whole job is a QR code, this layout is out of reach.
• Poster Generic (iOS 27). Declared with a posterGeneric dictionary alongside a legacy style, which older devices show instead. Apple’s own illustration of it includes a QR code, and its guide mentions no entitlement. We have not built one, so we cannot tell you how it renders on a device, and we would not rely on the mock-ups until we have.

Neither is animated. The field limits differ from the classic styles too; they are set out in Apple Wallet pass field limits.

The background image is larger but Wallet blurs it; the thumbnail is sharp but 90pt square. The strip is the only canvas that is big and crisp, so everything we would have wanted to animate goes into it as a still instead. Our engraved designs generate their artwork from the holder’s name, so two people on the same design get different strips: the one kind of uniqueness a static image can carry. Every size and style is in Apple Wallet pass image sizes.

Apple’s update web service is the mechanism: add webServiceURL and authenticationToken to the pass, and “you can update any type of pass and any information in the pass, except for the authentication token and the serial number”. That includes the images. Give a field a changeMessage such as “Gate changed to %@” and Wallet shows a notification with the new value when it changes.

This is not animation, and it should not be used to fake it: every update is a push, a download and a re-signed pass. It is the right tool for a pass whose content goes out of date. A business card is exactly that: change your job title and the pass in your Wallet should change with it. Cardr passes carry an update address, so editing your card updates the pass. More on how the card itself works in Apple Wallet business cards, and on the format in the pass guide.