NameDrop swaps basic contact details between two iPhones, or an iPhone and a recent Apple Watch, when you hold them close together. An NFC business card opens your full profile on any phone with NFC, Android included, and lets you change that profile after the meeting. If everyone you meet carries an iPhone and only needs your number, NameDrop is enough. For the rest, the card covers what NameDrop cannot.
What NameDrop shares
According to Apple's Personal Safety guide, NameDrop shares only your name, the phone number or email address you choose, and your Contact Poster. It leaves out the rest of your contact card, such as your home address or birthday. Before you send, you can pick which fields to include, and the same fields stay selected the next time.
To use it, both people hold the top of their phones a few centimeters apart until NameDrop appears on both screens. Each person chooses to share and receive, or only to receive. Moving the phones apart or locking one cancels the transfer.
It is a neat feature, and for two friends swapping numbers at dinner it is hard to beat.
Where NameDrop stops
NameDrop is an Apple to Apple feature. Both devices need iOS 17.1, or watchOS 10.1, or later, and the other device has to be an iPhone or a supported Apple Watch. If the person in front of you uses Android, nothing happens.
The second limit is what it carries. A name and one number or email is a phone book entry. It does not tell the other person your title, your company, where your work lives online, or why they should call you next week. In a business setting that context is most of the value of a card.
The third limit is easy to miss. Apple's own guide says NameDrop only works for sending new contact information, not for updating an existing contact. Once someone has you saved, a second NameDrop will not refresh the entry when your number or role changes.
What a tap card does differently
An NFC card holds a web address. When it touches the back of a phone, the phone opens that address in its browser. On iPhone XS and later this happens in the background, with no app, and Android phones with NFC switched on do the same. So the card works with whoever you are talking to, and the profile it opens can carry everything a paper card did plus your links.
It is also one way. The other person receives your profile without having to send theirs back, which matters in a meeting where the exchange should stay on your side until they choose otherwise. If they want to keep you, the Save contact button on the profile puts you in their address book, and the entry includes a link back to the live profile.
And because the card points at a page instead of storing your details, editing the profile changes what every card you have handed out opens. What happens after the exchange goes into why that matters for follow up.
When to use which
Use NameDrop when both of you carry iPhones, you want a quick two way swap, and a name and number is all either of you needs. Colleagues, friends, the person you will message later today.
Use the card when you do not know what phone the other person has, when you want them to see your role and your work and not just your number, and when your details may change before they next look you up. That covers most first meetings with clients, at events and abroad.
They do not compete for the same pocket. NameDrop lives in the phone you already carry, and the card sits wherever your paper cards used to. Before you hand either one to a stranger, it is worth a minute on what belongs on the profile, because both share exactly what you chose to publish.
If you would rather NameDrop not start when your phone is near someone else's, Apple lets you switch it off under Settings, General, AirDrop, Bring Devices Together.