Can an Android NFC phone act as an NFC tag?

Question

From what I have understood so far, an NFC phone will act as an NFC reader which will read data from an NFC tag. Now my question is, can we switch this around? Can we make an Android NFC phone behave as the tag which an NFC reader will get data from?

Thanks for your assistance.

Answer 1

Yes, take a look at NDEF Push in NFCManager - with Android 4 you can now even create the NDEFMessage to push to the active device at the time the interaction takes place.

Answer 2

No, not at the moment. Google pointed out at the Google IO 2011, that card emulation is not supported and won't be supported for a while. Main (and easy to understand) problem: Which App should get the right on the phone to emulate a smartcard?

Answer 3

Can we make an Android NFC as the tag which an NFC reader will get data from?

The Nexus S supports peer-to-peer mode, which as its name implies, causes one phone to act as a tag which another phone can read. There was a really good Google I/O session on NFC this year. I would recommended watching it if you're at all interested in NFC.

Answer 4

Check the Host-based Card Emulation (HCE) NFC mode available in Android 4.4.

API guide: https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/connectivity/nfc/hce.html

Answer 5

If you mean getting a powered NFC device to pretend to be a passive one (eg a tag).. not sure how well it works but the android app NFCClassic purports to record tag contents and then allow the tag to be activated and appear to be the copied tag to NFC readers. Creates a library of recorded tags.

Answer 6

For NFC tech, it is easy. For Google, it will not support it as Google wallet.