The Madrid Regional Transport Consortium has been testing a new app for carrying the transport card on your mobile phone for some time, but until now this app was only available in the testing phase. Finally, the Community of Madrid will activate the ‘Virtual Transport Card’ application starting today. It will initially be available only on Android devices.

It is important not to confuse this new app with the ‘Transport Card’ app, which allows users to top up transport cards and check their balance directly from their mobile phone. This app is available on both iOS and Android but does not allow you to carry the card on your mobile phone. Thanks to the new ‘Virtual Transportation Card’ application, we will now be able to leave our transportation card at home.

New app allows us to verify trips using mobile phone’s NFC

The ‘Virtual Transport Card’ application allows us to carry the transport card on our Android mobile phone and Verify trips by bringing the mobile phone closer to the turnstile or validator. The mobile phone will need to have a battery and we will need to have previously purchased a virtual transport card, which we can do from the application itself. Of course it only works with impersonal titles.

If you want to carry your transportation card on your mobile phone, the first thing you need to do is download the ‘Virtual Transportation Card’ application from Google Play. You should also make sure that you have Google Wallet installed as this app will be where the card will be stored. You must have a mobile phone with Android 7.0 operating system or above.

The Madrid Regional Transport Consortium has published a video explaining how the app works, although it is quite intuitive. To get a virtual card We will need to register our bank card in advance Entering data is something we only have to do once.

Once the previous step is completed we will need to press the ‘Buy titles and cards’ button to access the available options. The application offers us the following option: buy multiple travel and tourist ticketsso we will have to choose the option that interests us and complete the payment.

After purchasing the virtual card and the first title, We will need to add the card to Google Wallet. To do this, we just need to press the ‘Accept and continue’ button when the relevant message appears.

From now on we can Authenticate trips by bringing the mobile phone closer to the access verification circle. Almost instantly we will see a blue check mark confirming that the verification has been done correctly. Of course, the mobile phone will need to be turned on and NFC enabled.

Despite Unlocking the mobile phone is not requiredWe can configure the mobile phone to allow the use of NFC only if we have unlocked the device. To do this, we can enter the mobile settings and go to ‘Connected devices’ > ‘Connection preferences’ > ‘NFC’, where we need to enable the ‘Require device to be unlocked to use NFC’ option.

via | Community of Madrid

Cover image | Sergio Asenjo (Xataka Android)

Xataka on Android | We tested the ‘Transport Card’ app used to recharge public transport cards in Madrid