It is possible to bind Alloy's Actions to NFC tags so a certain Action can be promptly launched just by moving your iPhone over an NFC tag. You may check the Binding Actions to NFC Tags video that demonstrates how it works.


To use this functionality you should have:

  1.  iPhone that supports background NFC tags scanning (iPhone Xs, XS Max, Xr).
  2. Specially formatted NFC tags.


To format NFC tags you can use either:

Alloy provides two ways for binding: direct and indirect. 




Direct Binding

To directly bind and Action to a NFC tag:

  1. Copy a Universal Link for your Action (long press on an Action to show popup menu and choose the "Copy | Copy Universal Link").
  2. Write that link to a NFC tag.
  3. Hover a compatible iOS device over that NFC tag.
  4. Tap on a popped-up notification.
  5. See Alloy and your Action running.


Indirect Binding

To indirectly bind and Action to a NFC tag:

  1. Write a link in format https://32parrots.com/tag/<ID>  to a NFC tag. Where ID is any unique identifier of your choice. It is useful to batch encode several NFC tags with incremental ID's like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc so they look like https://32parrots.com/tag/1, https://32parrots.com/tag/2, https://32parrots.com/tag/3 etc.
  2. Hover a compatible iOS device over that NFC tag.
  3. Tap on a popped-up notification. 
  4. See Alloy running. Note: do not hold iOS device over an NFC tag during binding to avoid accidentally launching bound Action right after binding complete.
  5. Respond to a prompt to bind that NFC tag to some Action and follow the instructions.
  6. After that you can hover a compatible iOS device over that NFC tag.
  7. Tap on a popped-up notification.
  8. See Alloy and your Action running.

Indirect binding is very flexible so you can re-bind Actions to NFC tags on the fly with no need to re-encode tags. You have to remove current binding by editing bound Actions and clearing their NFC Tags ID's. Then you can rebind corresponding tags as stated above.