Apple Locks iPhone 6/6+ NFC To Apple Pay Only

Ronin Developer writes From the Cnet article: "At last week's Apple event, the company announced Apple Pay — a new mobile payments service that utilizes NFC technology in conjunction with its Touch ID fingerprint scanner for secure payments that can be made from the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus or Apple Watch. Apple also announced a number of retailers that would accept Apple Pay for mobile payments at launch. However, Cult of Mac reports that NFC will be locked to the Apple Pay platform, meaning the technology will not be available for other uses. An Apple spokesperson confirmed the lock down of the technology, saying developers would be restricted from utilizing its NFC chip functionality for at least a year. Apple declined to comment on whether NFC capability would remain off limits beyond that period." So, it would appear, for at least a year, that Apple doesn't want competing mobile payment options to be available on the newly released iPhone 6 and 6+. While it's understandable that they want to promote their payment scheme and achieve a critical mass for Apple Pay, it's a strategy that may very well backfire as other other mobile payment vendors gain strength on competing platforms.

Comments

Re:So much for mobile payments in Japan

[swillden]

essentially the existing SoftCard EMV standard

SoftCard EMV standard? Wow, that's like calling HTTP the Google networking standard. EMV existed long before SoftCard (formerly called ISIS), and in fact long before Google Wallet (which predated SoftCard/ISIS by quite some time)... before NFC existed, even.