How to Turn Your iPhone into a Full-Fledged NFC Tag Emulator

Android owners have been cloning work badges, intercom fobs, and transit passes directly from their phones for years. On iOS, the situation has always been bleak: the NFC chip in iPhones is locked tight to Apple Pay and basic NDEF record reading through the system API. Apple has never allowed any free tag emulation.

Recently I came across the TrollNFC project from the OwnGoal Studio team. The developers wrote a custom driver for working with the NFC chip on iOS 15 and above. The utility can read, write, and emulate cards directly from an iPhone.

What's Inside and How It Works

The main problem with iOS was the sandbox restrictions built into the system: the CoreNFC framework can read data but is severely limited in low-level operations. TrollNFC gets around this barrier using TrollStore. This is a utility for installing apps without system sandbox restrictions, using signing vulnerabilities in iOS 15+.

Thanks to direct hardware access, the app can:

• Read and save tag dumps to local storage
• Emulate UID and NDEF data, pretending to be a physical card
• Edit NDEF records, including text fields and URLs
• Batch write and read multiple tags at once

If you need to back up an office badge or quickly configure a dozen smart tags for launching automations, all actions are performed without external programmers like Proxmark3 or Flipper Zero.

What's Still Missing

The authors openly share their roadmap in the repository. Currently, the custom driver's stability is still being refined, and some low-level features are still in development.

The authors' plans include:

• Reading and direct writing of raw data
• Amiibo figure emulation with the ability to import your own keys
• Decryption and encryption of protected card sectors

Requirements and Usage Model

TrollNFC is distributed as pre-built releases on GitHub. To run it, you'll need an NFC-capable iPhone with TrollStore installed on firmware iOS 15.0 and above. On newer iOS versions without the necessary vulnerabilities, you won't be able to launch the project.

The repository itself doesn't contain open-source code for the driver logic, so it's more of a showcase for a ready-made binary with a task tracker.

The developers use a freemium model:

1. In free mode, you can test compatibility and emulate exactly one card with all available features.
2. For unlimited card management, they ask for a $9.99/year subscription per device through an in-app purchase.

Who Is This For

The project will interest those who already have TrollStore configured on a daily or test iPhone. It's a handy pocket tool for basic tag manipulation, testing access control systems, and quickly editing NDEF tags without a computer connection.

If you plan to use the utility, first make sure to test your required cards on the free tier, as not all tag types are supported by the current driver version. Source code and builds are available on the project's releases page.