I accidentally became PureGym’s unofficial Apple Wallet developer

Summary

47 seconds: A villain origin story ¶ Wednesday, 11:15 AM. I'm at the PureGym entrance doing the universal gym app dance. Phone out, one bar of signal that immediately gives up because apparently the building is wrapped in aluminum foil. Connect to PureGym WiFi. Wait for it to actually connect. Open the app. "Warming up..." The entire feed loads—suggested workouts I'll never do, my "recent" activities from 2024, a motivational quote that makes me question humanity and myself. Oh, and would I like to enable push notifications? No. How about this special offer for personal training? Also no. Finally, I can tap "Gym access." Loading spinner. The QR code materializes eventually like it's 2000 and I'm downloading a JPEG on dial-up. Someone behind me clears their throat. Scan at the pod, the barrier grunts open. Total time: 47 seconds. Before: 47 seconds of app archaeology After: 3 seconds of magic I do this 6 days a week. That's 282 seconds of my life every week just trying to enter a building. As someone who's spent more than a decade optimising iOS apps for a living, watching myself suffer through this UX disaster daily was starting to feel like cosmic punishment. Meanwhile, Amazon Fresh lets people walk out with £200 of groceries without even touching their phone. But here I am, performing a full mobile obstacle course just to lift heavy things and put them back down. The eight-year PIN mystery ¶ Before we dive into the technical meat, let me share the security contradiction that made me question reality itself. I've been using the same 8-digit PIN code at PureGym turnstiles for eight years. EIGHT. YEARS. Same code. Never changed. Never expired. It survived COVID, three prime ministers, and the entire rise and fall of NFTs. I could literally tattoo this PIN on my forehead and use it as biometric authentication at this point. But the QR code in the app? That bad boy refreshes every 60 seconds like it's protecting nuclear launch codes. Think about this for a second. The ...