This is not a call for help, I’m just curious to understand what’s going on here: I’ve long stopped carrying any cards with me because Apple Pay never let me down. But today In tried to pay for lunch, my card (via Apple Pay) was declined. Tried a different card. Also declined. I started to suspect that this is not an issue with any of the cards but with apple pay. So I tried a third card and, indeed: also declined. Fortunately, the Take Away place said I could pay next time, but it puzzled me why it wasnt working. Just a few two days earlier, it worked. For a moment, I suspected there might be a problem with their terminal but the next customer paid with Apple Pay no problem.
So, while I was waiting, I looked into Apple wallet and into the details of each card and I noticed that none of them had a billing address. When I tapped “billing address” I was offered two addresses, my work address and my home address (neither of them was selected). Once I selected my home address, the payment went through.
So, to me, it looks like what happened in the last 48 hours or so is that my work address (which I never added as a billing address to any of my credit cards) became a potential billing address for all of my cards and since Apple Wallet didn’t know which address was the correct one, it left the field blank and the absence of a billing address caused the payments to be declined.
If this is correct, then I‘m wondering
- what can possibly cause my work address to be pushed into my Apple Wallet as a candidate billing address?
- why would the addition of a possible billing address remove the existing billing address for all cards after years of doing its job?-
Some potentially relevant context:
- my phone has two esims: one for my private line one for work (paid for and controlled by my employer)
- I am still on iOS 17.6.1, so no recent upgrades took place. Also, on my other devices it‘s Sonoma 14.6.1. I can think of nothing that might have triggered anything. Neither can I see how anything my employer or the phone company might do with the sim card could have any affect on Apple Pay. But maybe this is where I‘m going wrong?
- The most likely source of my work address is the contact marked as “me”, which has both my home and my work address. But it has has this for years and while it has not always had the “me” tag, the day when Ivadded it is so long ago that I don’t even remember how I did it. Definitely nothing that happened in the past days, weeks, or even months.
I don’t remember when the Apple Wallet app was last updated, but is it possible that the app suddenly decided it needed to consider all addresses in the “me”-contact as potential billing addresses and force the user to select one of them?
I know. Nobody in their right mind thinks about this for a second after the problem has effectively been solved. But since you’re still reading, you’re probably also a nerd. Well, let’s see if we can figure it out. 