Apple has updated its website to say that support for government IDs, which was supposed to reach the Wallet app sometime this year, is now expected to debut in early 2022.
The company revealed its plan to bring driver's licenses and other state-issued forms of identification to Wallet at WWDC in June. Then in September it revealed the first eight states—Arizona, Georgia, Connecticut, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Oklahoma, and Utah—that planned to make digital IDs available via the iPhone and Apple Watch through this program.
MacRumors reports that support for these IDs isn't available in the developer beta of iOS 15.2, however, which is likely to be the last upgrade to the operating system released in 2021. (Assuming it even reaches consumers by the end of the year.) It would make sense for the feature to arrive with iOS 15.3 and watchOS 8.x sometime in the beginning of 2022.
Apple didn't say why it delayed the release of this feature, but it's possible that states pushed back against the program's requirements, which according to CNBC are quite strict. The company is said to be requiring state governments to pay to promote the digital IDs, offer them free of charge to people renewing their licenses, and push them on agencies like the IRS.
Apple didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.