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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.
NFC has taken off in Aus in a big way. With most retail outlets having terminals that take Paypass/Tap&Go ( NFC payment brand names here ) accepted across competing financial institutions. There is zero chance Apple will make any headway here asking retailers to forgo the already established infrastructure. Also basically asking retailers to stump up money to install another payment network. Given the existing network was no additional cost to them. Apple is making a mistake here. I don't think it will hurt them too much but Apple Pay will certainly not be a reason for market share growth of the platform. The larger screens most certainly will give them some growth but not this ridiculous shackle.
I've been a long time iPhone user (every model since it's inception) and I have liked all those phones a lot. I've made some apps and have made myself completely tied down to the platform by spending money on apps and music. This NFC-thing is kind of like magic. I have a friend with that capability on his phone and it seems to me that this NFC-thing is a complete no-brainer in terms of interconnecting devices. I was actually waiting for the moment that Apple finally introduced this NXP-chip into the iPhone. Apple want to restrict the use of the chip to ApplePay? Guess what: In the country where I live - there is already an NFC-infrastructure and the banks have apps that use it - just not on iOS. What to do? Should I ditch the whole Apple universe and go for a Linux-phone and at the same time leave my wallet at home. Yeah. I think I might just do that. One year of waiting for Apple to "maybe" get their shit together and realize that the world is larger than the US; that's a long time for something that's been around for years now. Bye bye Apple. It's been good. iOS is the best OS and the iPhone is catching up. But this is it for me. I want that wallet-killer right now - not "when Apple decides that it has enough monopoly in the US to maybe open it up for other actors".
They got people lined up to support it because they're huge. If Guatamala tried to bring in a new method for passport control do you think they'd have the same chance of it being adopted as it would if the US did? I'm not knocking Apples implementation, I just don't see anything remotely amazing about what they have managed to achieve; yet there's endless fanboys banging on about just that. Give me one example of the marketting for Pay that's so impressive it's worthy of note.
The iPhone is popular here but I wouldn't say as popular as it used to be, or is in other countries. I remember them putting out rope barriers for the 5s launch and hardly anyone turned up at Yodobashi in Akiba. Right now interest in the iPhone 6 doesn't seem that high either. There are too many good rival phones.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The speed of NFC is a few hundred kbps and is not designed for bulk data transfer. The NFC is most likely used to setup a much faster Bluetooth or Wifi transfer in a way that guarantees that the transfer has been initiated by a device in close proximity.
With longer range protocols (Wifi/Bluetooth/etc), you need other ways to pair the devices to make sure you're transferring your naked photos to the right endpoint.
With NFC, what you see is what you get, but the NFC layer is only used for connection setup.
put a cover on their iPhone that they can put their NFC card into and use it that way
Terminology clarification: If it's in a card, it's not NFC, it's a "contactless smart card". NFC is, specifically, a variant of the contactless smart card protocols embedded in a larger, battery-powered device. It does emulate a contactless smart card, which is how it enables payments, but it does a lot more as well. NFC devices can also act as smart card readers (note that "reader" is something of a misnomer; it's just two computers talking to one another) and they can also act as RFID tags or readers (or writers, for tags that are writable).
This broad array of capabilities, BTW, just highlights how unfortunate it is that Apple is limiting it. In Android-land, not only can you use NFC to make payments (Google Wallet, whatever the ISIS Wallet has been renamed to), but there are a lot more uses:
1. You can download one of many smart card reader apps (or write your own) and use them to read any contactless smart card you have around, including many payment cards. What you can see depends on the security protocols implemented by the card, obviously, and also depends on whether your app knows the right commands to send. If you like you can buy your own Javacards, program them, and write your own app to talk to them, to do whatever it is that you'd like to do.
2. Most of said smart card reader apps also support reading and writing RFID tags, which you can buy inexpensively. Many people have come up with uses for these, such as automatically changing phone configuration (volume, etc.) when a particular tag is scanned. My Moto X offers the ability to register an RFID tag as an unlocking device; whenever I scan one of the registered tags, my phone unlocks.
3. Ever since Jelly Bean (IIRC), Android has used NFC as a method to initiate device-to-device data transfer. On several occasions when my wife and I have been driving separate vehicles to the same location, I pull it up on Google Maps, tap my phone to hers and touch the screen, and then it's on her phone. You can transfer pictures, files, and anything else apps care to support. NFC isn't actually used for the data transfer to avoid having to hold the phones together for a long period of time, but it identifies the pair of phones that wish to do the transfer, which is then carried out through Wifi or mobile data.
... and more. Here are some more concrete examples of clever uses to which people have put Android's NFC capabilities: http://trendblog.net/creative-...
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NFC has never caught on being freely available. It won't be adopted with even tighter restrictions. Sorry by NFC is a failure that was never articulated honestly or clearly, never implemented widely and so we don't know how or if it will work or what happens when it goes wrong.
Oh google? You mean mean the Google Wallet that isn't available in large parts of the world? They need to deploy terminals? That's a fail right there.
Apple Pay will be able to use Google Wallet / ISIS (SoftCard) terminals, and vice versa. They all use the same protocols and base technology.
Apple Pay will be successful, and Apple will garner much praise for that success from people like you who don't know the industry, but what's really going to make it successful isn't anything Apple is doing or has done, but what Visa and MasterCard did two years ago, when they announced that the liability shift will be imposed in the US in October 2015. That policy change by the card networks will give merchants huge financial incentive to get all of the necessary terminals deployed, which is why many of them are now (and have been for some time) gearing up to integrate and deploy chip-capable point-of-sale terminals.
And, if you want to look at the causes for Visa and MasterCard's decision... the biggest single factor was almost certainly the deployment of Google Wallet, which moved NFC payment in the US from a "someday" possibility to "people are using it now". At the end of the day, Apple Pay will owe most of it's success to Google.
I don't want to disparage Apple too much here, though, because they have been able to do one thing of huge significance, and it is their market position and clout with the mobile network operators (MNOs) that made it possible: They helped push through the deployment of network-level tokenization. This is a somewhat abstruse technical detail, but it's pretty important.
Right now Apple Pay, SoftPay and Google Wallet all use different approaches to how they push the transaction through the networks. Google Wallet uses a "proxy card". When you pay with Google Wallet you're actually paying with a Google-issues MasterCard debit card. That's what the merchant sees. Then Google turns around and charges whatever backing instrument you've specified (Wallet balance, bank account, debit card or credit card). This approach offers maximum flexibilty; if someone dreams up some payment mechanism and Google integrates it, you can get your payments directed to it. The downsides are that (1) it's the same credit card number every time, which means that if it gets stolen and used fraudulently (which is far harder than for a magstripe card) then Google has to take on the fraud liability; (2) the point-of-sale transaction is "card present" while Google's transaction with your payment instrument on the back end is "card not present", which means if the backing instrument is a credit card Google has to eat the difference between the front and back-end transaction fees; and (3) all transactions pass through Google, which means Google sees how much you spend through Wallet and where (which has some upsides as well; I like the payment notifications it enables and the ability to look up my payment history on any device as well as the level of control it offers me). Note that Google can't see what you bought, but obviously a lot can be inferred from location.
SoftPay (nee ISIS) uses "issuer tokenization". You can only pay with credit cards from a certain (and still fairly small -- AMEX, Chase and Wells Fargo) set of issuing banks. The banks issue "tokens" which look like credit card numbers but are only good for a single use. These are stored in the secure element on your phone and transmitted to the merchant when you pay. Security is arguably better than with Google Wallet, and there are some corner cases that are less problematic. SoftPay doesn't get involved in your transactions, although there are some indications that the app may deliver information about them to SoftPay and to your carrier, though they don't provide that information back to you as a convenient transaction log like Google does. The reason the list of cards you can use is small is because each individual issuer has to get their systems set up to support token issuance. That'
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