When NameDrop arrived in iOS 17, a few people asked me the same thing: does this kill the NFC business card? I build a digital business card app, so it was a fair question to put to me - and I didnât mind it, because NameDrop genuinely is lovely.
You bring two iPhones close, a small animation plays, a soft haptic taps, and a contact moves from one phone to the other. It is exactly the kind of polished little interaction Apple is good at. I have used it plenty. It works, and it feels nice.
But I have watched enough people try to swap details in the real world to know where it stops being enough.
NameDrop is iPhone to iPhone. That is the whole story. The moment the person across the table is holding an Android phone - and globally, most people are - the elegant animation has nothing to connect to. At a conference, a client dinner, a property viewing, you donât choose what the other person carries. A contact-sharing method that only works when both sides happen to own the right phone isnât really a method. It is a happy accident.
An NFC business card doesnât care what the other phone is. It runs on the open NFC standard that both iOS and Android have read for years. The other person taps it, or scans its QR code, and your details land on their phone - whether that phone is an iPhone or not, and whether or not they have any app installed. No gesture to learn, no feature to switch on, no operating system to match.
That is the unglamorous reason I still build around NFC rather than NameDrop. NameDrop optimizes the best case: two iPhone users, both with the feature enabled, both knowing the gesture. NFC optimizes the case that actually happens at an event - two people, two phones, and no shared assumptions about either. NameDrop is the better demo. NFC is the better business card.
Want one? Get NFC.cool Business Card on iPhone, or use the bundled business card in NFC.cool Tools for Android.