I forgot my iPhone at a restaurant. I know where it is and can pick it up tomorrow, but in the meantime, I want to disable Apple Pay to ensure no one gets the idea of using it for touchless pay. Is there a way to do that?
You can indeed remotely disable Apple Pay on your iPhone or any other Apple device, but I’m not sure you need to worry about it too much. When you recover your phone, lock it, point the screen away from you, then double-click on the power button to pay. It won’t proceed, prompting for Face ID or a Passcode instead. Unless they can guess your code or have a very realistic photo of your face, it won’t work.
However, knowing which of your Apple devices are set up with Apple Pay is smart, and it turns out that there is indeed a way to remotely disable it on one or more devices from the Web. It all revolves around you using iCloud and knowing your iCloud login credentials. Let’s have a look!
IDENTIFY APPLE DEVICES WITH APPLE PAY ENABLED
Go to iCloud.com and log in. The main screen the offers up a lot of options and access to quite a bit of the data that’s backed up from your phone, computer, iPad, etc:
You can use Find iPhone to identify the location of all your devices and confirm that your iPhone is still at the hotel. Check your phone contacts list with Contacts, and even peek at your Calendar to ensure you haven’t missed any critical appointments! For our task, however, you need to go to “Account Settings“. Click on that.
You can see that I have quite a few devices hooked into my iCloud account, including an iPad, iPhone, Mac Mini, Apple TV and two MacBook Pros. Guess you could say I like Apple hardware.
More importantly, look very closely at the entries for the iPad Mini, iDave 13 Pro and M1 MacBook Pro: All three have a tiny Apple Pay icon. That means that all three of these devices have a credit card or two set up and are ostensibly at risk (relative to the scofflaw unlocking the device).
HOW TO REMOTELY DISABLE APPLE PAY
Let’s disable Apple Pay on the iPhone 13 Pro. A click on the device and more information is shown:
You can see that it lists both Apple Card and Apple Cash. Below that, however, is the link we seek: “Remove All…“.
Click on “Remove All…” and you’ll have to confirm that’s really what you want to do:
Easy enough, really. Tap on “Remove” and you’ll have a couple of progress windows appear. First, this:
Then this, once the appropriate signal has been sent to the iPhone itself:
Did it work? Check your listing of devices again:
It did indeed. iDave 13 Pro is listed, but the tiny Apple Pay icon has been removed. Mission accomplished.
TO RESTORE APPLE PAY ON AN IPHONE
When you get your phone back, go into the Wallet app and it’ll prompt you to add Apple Cash – tap “Continue” and it’ll do all the work – then you can re-add your actual payment card in the same app. I restored everything in less than 90 seconds after going through all the steps in this tutorial!
Pro Tip: I’ve been writing about the iPhone and iOS since the very first iPhone was released. I’ve also owned every major iPhone model! Please check out my iPhone help articles while you’re visiting. Thanks!