Launch Center Pro now supports NFC! You can trigger actions from NFC stickers as well as input data associated with specific stickers. iPhone XR and newer (XS, XS Max, 11, 11 Pro, 11 Pro Max) can scan NFC stickers in the background (as long as the screen is on) to trigger a notification that then triggers an action. iPhone 7, 8, and X support NFC, but without background scanning, you have to open Launch Center Pro then tap an action to bring up the NFC scanning view.
Settings up an NFC Sticker (XR and newer)
To encode a generic NFC sticker, follow this guide.
Once a sticker has been properly encoded, simply tap the top of the iPhone to the sticker, then tap the notification.
This will prompt you to associate an action (or multiple actions) with the sticker. Once you've selected at least one action, tap the Add button and you're done.
Using an NFC Sticker (XR and newer)
Wake the screen and tap the top of your iPhone to the sticker, then tap the notification. That's it!
(In our testing, it works best to aim for tapping the top edge of the iPhone to the porthole in the Launch Center Pro sticker, but it's generally pretty forgiving.)
Managing NFC Stickers
There are two ways to manage stickers, you can enter Edit mode, select an action with an associated sticker then tap the NFC Stickers row, or you can go to Settings within the app and tap the NFC Stickers row.
Metal Object Warning
Most NFC stickers don’t support being affixed to metal objects. For example, if the sticker is on the back of an iPad, iPhone, MacBook Pro, etc it won't work at all. If the metal has a thin layer of other material such as a case on an iPad, the sticker will work, but it'll still be hit or miss.
Advanced NFC Options
Let's say you want to track your book collection using Launch Center Pro stickers. Place the sticker on the back of the book, then create a data field for Title and enter the data, say "Moby Dick", and create a field for Author and enter the data "Herman Melville". Do the same for a few more books. Now we'll create a Dropbox action to log data to a text file on Dropbox (you could also use webhooks to push the data pretty much anywhere using Zapier or other APIs).
launch://dropbox/append?text=[list|Check In=IN|Check Out=OUT]{{ [textexpander:ddate] [nfc:Title] by [nfc:Author]}}&name={{Library.txt}}
This action would first give you the option to select whether you're checking the book in or out, then append a new line to the Library.txt file on Dropbox with the status (IN or OUT), the date (using a TextExpander snippet), and the details of the book. Once you've created this action, you can trigger the action manually and then scan the sticker, or you can associate all of your stickers to the same action and the data associated with each sticker will be used depending on which sticker you tap to launch the action.
Although we've pre-encoded our own stickers so that they are configured to launch the app via our Universal Link, you can use the [nfc] input tag with any random NFC sticker. Using just [nfc] will enter the data that's encoded on the sticker (useful for satisfying your curiosity if you happen upon a random NFC sticker). You can also add a random sticker to Launch Center Pro, associate data, and use it with manually triggered actions. One caveat here is that some NFC stickers are protected and can only be scanned when supplied with the correct token. So don't expect Launch Center Pro to see what data is passed during an Apple Pay transaction, or scan every sticker you come across.
[nfc] Triggers a scan and inserts the data read from the tag
[nfc:name] Triggers a scan and inserts the value associated with name that has been added to this specific sticker
[nfc:name:default] Triggers a scan and inserts the value associated with name that has been added to this specific sticker. If the name is not found associated with this sticker, it uses default. The default value will be used on devices that don’t support NFC, like iPads.
Examples
[nfc:Title:A Nice Book] If the sticker has associated data named "Title" it would insert the value, if not, it would insert "A Nice Book"
[nfc:Title] If the sticker has associated data named "Title" it would insert the value, if not, nothing is inserted
Using NFC stickers with an iPhone 7, 8, or X
These devices do not support background NFC tag scanning, so the only way to use them is by inserting the [nfc] input tag into an action URL and tapping that action to bring up the NFC scanning view. Or, you can create an action with launch://nfc as the URL, but this would require you to tap an action to scan an NFC tag to run an action. In most cases it would be easier to just tap the action you want to run.