Square, Lemon Add Support for Apple's Passbook Wallet

Square Inc. and Lemon Inc., two companies that offer mobile wallets on Apple's iPhone handsets, have updated their apps to work with Apple's Passbook wallet. 

Passbook is a wallet app that stores cards and tickets from other apps. It can switch on certain cards based on a user's location or the time of day. For example, users of the Starbucks card app can link it to Passbook so their cards appear on the iPhone's screen when they visit Starbucks locations. 

Square's support of Passbook is tied to the company's new e-gift card feature. Users of Square Register, which is Square's card-acceptance app for merchants, now have the ability to offer digital gift cards that users can purchase and redeem in the Square Wallet app for consumers. 

These digital gift cards can be offered through the Passbook app. Consumers can also print these cards as quick-response (QR) codes for merchants to scan at the register, according to the Dec. 9 update notes on the Square Register app's page in the Apple App Store.

Lemon's app allows users to scan cards with a phone's camera to store digital versions in its wallet app. According to the app's update notes, the new version of Lemon Wallet, posted to the App store Dec. 8, makes these cards accessible through Passbook.