How NFC stickers work

What NFC actually is

NFC stands for Near Field Communication. The sticker has no battery and no power of its own. When you hold a phone against it, the phone's radio field powers the chip just long enough for it to answer — which is why a tag still works years later, and why it does nothing at all sitting in a drawer.

The chips in Toque stickers run at 13.56 MHz and follow ISO/IEC 14443A, the same family of standards behind contactless cards and transit passes. Range is short by design: you hold the phone against the sticker rather than waving it nearby.

What is stored on the sticker

One thing: a web address. Nothing else. A Toque sticker holds a link like https://toque.cookcredit.com/t/tag_… and no other data — no personal information, no instructions, no program.

That is deliberate, and it is the part most people find surprising. Because the sticker stores only a pointer, what a sticker does is decided by the server every single time it is tapped. You can change what a sticker opens after it is stuck to a bottle, a menu, a door, or a machine — without touching the sticker again. Rewrite the page and the same sticker opens the new one.

It also means a sticker cannot carry a virus or run code — it is a link, and nothing more. On an iPhone the link arrives as a notification you choose to tap. On Android it usually opens straight in your browser, so treat a sticker the way you would treat any link someone hands you.

Will my phone read it?

Almost certainly, if it was made in the last several years. Where phones differ is whether you have to turn anything on first.

Every Toque sticker also works as a QR code, so a phone without NFC — or a guest who would rather point a camera — is never locked out.

Writing a sticker yourself

Writing needs Web NFC, which today is Chromium on Android only — Chrome for Android, Edge, Opera and Samsung Internet. Safari does not support it, so an iPhone cannot write a tag from the browser, and no desktop browser can either, even with a USB reader plugged in.

If you have an Android phone, you need nothing else: no app, no account, no cable. Open the writer, pick what the sticker should do, and hold a blank tag against the back of the phone.

If you only have an iPhone, you have two good options: buy stickers already written and ready to tap, or have someone with an Android phone write them once.

Locking a sticker, and why it is permanent

A written tag can be locked so its contents can never be changed. Locking is an explicit choice, not the default: writing a tag by hand leaves it rewritable, so a test tag is never ruined by accident. When you write a real tag from Studio, lock is pre-selected — and the batch writer locks every sticker in a run.

Lock anything going somewhere public. An unlocked sticker on a storefront or a table can be quietly rewritten by anyone with a phone, pointing your customers somewhere you did not choose.

Locking cannot be undone. It is a physical, one-way change to the chip. A locked sticker can still be re-pointed at new content — that is what the server is for — but the address burned into the chip is final.

Which chip, and does it matter?

The common NFC sticker chips are NTAG213, NTAG215 and NTAG216. The practical difference is how much they hold: 144, 504 and 888 bytes of user memory respectively.

Toque ships NTAG213, and for this job that is not a compromise. A Toque sticker stores one short link, which is a few dozen bytes — so 144 is roomy, and paying for 888 buys space that stays empty. Larger chips matter when you are storing whole vCards or long text on the tag itself. Toque deliberately does not: the server holds everything, so the sticker stays small, cheap, and changeable.

When a tap does not work

• Move the phone. The antenna is near the top edge on iPhones and usually the middle of the back on Android. A centimetre matters.
• Wake and unlock the phone first. A locked or sleeping screen often will not scan.
• Take off a thick case, especially one with a metal plate, a wallet, or a magnetic mount. These sit exactly where the antenna is.
• Watch the surface. Metal detunes the antenna, so a sticker on a bare steel shelf may not read at all. On-metal NFC stickers add a ferrite layer for this; Toque's standard stickers are not on-metal, so ask us if that is what you need.
• Check NFC is on in Android Settings, or use the Control Center NFC Tag Reader on an iPhone 7 through X.
• Use the QR code if you are stuck. It goes to exactly the same place.

Common questions