I've been waiting for Apple to open up their NFC hardware too. I'm working on a closed loop payment app (https://www.loopz.io) that uses NFC and Apple's lockdown has been frustrating since the first question I get when showing the app is; does it work on iOS? This is the first step in them allowing access to the NFC chip hopefully. The chip in iPhone 6 and 7 supports writing to tags (which I need for my app) but it's not exposed through the API's at the moment. Android has allowed this since Gingerbread.