Near-field communication, commonly called NFC, is a communications protocol that allows two devices to communicate when they are very close to each other, within about an inch or so. You might already use NFC every day in an access card for your office, parking garage, etc. The iPhone has had NFC support since the iPhone 7, but to use NFC on an iPhone 7, iPhone 8, or iPhone X, you first need to launch an app which is made to work with NFC. That's not convenient. The newest iPhones — the iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, and iPhone XR — can support NFC without first launching any special app. Your iPhone just needs to have the screen turned on and be unlocked. The idea is that you can tap your iPhone to an NFC tag (or hold it really close) and you can trigger some action. You still need to have an app to handle the action, but with the newest iPhones that app does not need to be open. One such app is Launch Center Pro.
Launch Center Pro is an app that you can use to launch shortcuts. It has been around for a very long time (I reviewed the app back in 2012) and it has improved over the years. You might, for example, configure the app so that every time you press a button in the app, the app sends a text to one or more people with a specific message. Launch Center Pro is no longer the best automation app on the iPhone now that we also have the Shortcuts app, but the two apps are not identical, and each can do some things that the other cannot do, or cannot do as well. One example is that Launch Center Pro can support NFC stickers, but Shortcuts cannot.
Here's how it works. You buy some NFC stickers in the app. Then you place the sticker someplace, such as on an item on your desk. Then you tell Launch Center Pro what to do whenever you tap that NFC sticker. It's not unlike using the "Hey, Siri" function along with Shortcuts, HomeKit, etc. so that something happens (like turn on the dining room lights) when you tell Siri to do that task. But with NFC, you don't have to say anything out loud, which can be more appropriate in a location like your office, where you might not want other people to hear you talking to Siri.
You buy the Launch Center Pro NFC stickers in the app. I bought a set of five clear ones for $5, or you can buy a set of five with the app's logo for $8. Note that for the clear ones, the sticker portion is clear, but you can still see the silver NFC components. Each sticker is round and about an inch in diameter.
Currently, the stickers sold in the app don't work if affixed to metal objects, such as the back of a MacBook Pro or an iPad. The developer suggests that this could change in the future if there are enough requests for it.
Place the sticker in the desired location, and then use the Launch Center Pro app to add the sticker to its list of recognized NFC tags. Now you can create any shortcut in the Launch Center Pro app — which can include, for example, a command to launch a shortcut that you created in the Shortcuts app — and then tell Launch Center Pro to associate a specific NFC tag with that action.
Now, when you tap your iPhone to the NFC tag, you will see an alert at the top of the screen. Tap that alert and the Launch Center Pro app will launch and the action will occur.
You can have more than one action associated with a single NFC sticker. When you do this, tapping the NFC sticker with your iPhone will cause the app to ask you to pick one of the actions from a list.
Part of me wishes that I could skip the step of tapping that alert. It would be faster if I could just tap the NFC sticker and have the automation action run right away. But as the Help documentation in Launch Center Pro explains, "for security and usability reasons, iOS requires user interaction in order to complete an action. ... If any app could take actions without user intervention, it would allow shady apps to do things like send your phone to malicious websites, pre-fill messages to paid text messaging accounts, or even use malicious NFC stickers to directly compromise your device and steal your persona data."
It's fun to trigger actions that I configure just using a tap on an NFC sticker. But is it useful? The answer to that question depends upon your own creativity, and I'll admit that for now, I haven't yet settled upon anything groundbreaking. I've got one that sends a text to my wife to let her know that I'm about to leave work so I'll be home soon. I've got one that sends a silly text to my son, just because he and I were playing with the NFC function and configured it that way. But I know that I'll come up with more useful NFC actions in the future, and I like the idea of having an additional way to trigger actions. For some folks, it might be useful to tap an NFC sticker to start a timer, making it easier to track time for your timesheets. Others might find it useful to have a certain song or playlist start playing when you tap the NFC sticker. Some folks might put a sticker in a kitchen to launch a grocery app.
Note that while the Launch Center Pro app is very powerful, it is also a little complicated to use, especially at first. There are great help guides to walk you through it, but you are going to have to put a little time into this app the first time that you use it. And while the app itself is free, you need to pay $4.95 to unlock the NFC feature, or you can choose one of several other payment options. (I pay a $9.99 yearly subscription which unlocks all of the features, mainly because I love that this developer has long been figuring out ways to push the envelope on iPhone automation so I want to subscribe to encourage future efforts.)
If you think that triggering actions using an NFC sticker instead of Siri sounds like it could be useful for you, or even if it just sounds like something you would have playing with, then you should check out Launch Center Pro.
Click here to get Launch Center Pro (free): 
