Will your phone read your passport chip?

The requirement GOV.UK does not list

GOV.UK says you need a phone with a working camera, and either an iPhone 8 or newer running iOS 16.7 or higher, or an Android phone running Android 10 or higher. That is the entire list. The letters NFC do not appear on the page. But the app works by holding your phone against the chip in your passport, and it needs a specific piece of hardware, an NFC reader, to do that. So a phone can meet every requirement GOV.UK prints and still be unable to finish the check.

This is not an old-phone problem

It would be simpler if it were. The Android version requirement is the one people worry about, and it is the one steadily disappearing as old handsets retire. The chip reader is the opposite. Manufacturers still leave it out of new budget phones to save a little on the cost, so a phone released this year can run the newest Android, satisfy every requirement GOV.UK states, and have nothing inside it to read a chip with. Signicat, whose software does the passport reading behind a number of government apps, puts it plainly: almost all mid-end and high-end smartphones have NFC, although not all lower-end smartphones do.

The model name will not tell you

Two phones from the same family, released in the same year at almost the same price, can differ: one has the reader and the other does not, and the names are a character apart. Some models are sold with it in one country and without it in another, so even an exact model number is not a reliable answer. And there is no published figure for how many phones carry a reader in any of the countries our customers live in. That absence is its own answer. Nobody tracks it, so nobody can tell you in advance. The only reliable check is the phone in your hand.

If your phone cannot do it

GOV.UK offers two other free routes and, for most people reading this, neither is open. Answering security questions online needs a UK credit record or UK government records to draw on. The Post Office route means standing in a branch in the United Kingdom. GOV.UK's own guidance to the teams building these services says it outright: people who are not British citizens and live overseas can only prove their identity using the app, and they will also need a chipped passport. So for someone abroad, the phone is not one option among several. It is the whole of the free route.

What else stops people

Two things, from our own casework. The address step is the most common: a bill in someone else's name, an address that does not quite match, or a screenshot of a banking app instead of a downloaded statement. The second is quieter. Some passports carry a single name, with the given-names box left blank, which is entirely correct under the international passport standard and ordinary in Indonesia, Afghanistan, Myanmar and parts of southern India. GOV.UK states that you cannot prove your identity with One Login if the names do not match exactly, and a form built around a first name and a last name has nowhere to put a name that was never in two parts.

What counts as proof of address?