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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.
That NFC will be made available via jailbreak, I do not doubt.
That it will happen quite that *fast*, I do doubt. Apple has gotten really good at lockdown.
Note that Lockdown != Security. Security means preventing unauthorized access. If you can't even authorize *yourself* to get access, it's either not "security" or it's not your device (or both).
If you want NFC, go with Samsung, or HTC, or Nokia, or one of the many other phone OEMs who have been including NFC hardware and software that lets you use it for years now.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
The mobile payment market is completely fragmented. Apple is by far not the first company to announce a payment scheme, however it is the first that has managed to make some concrete deals with several companies and it's the first that actually has a chance at taking off.
Apple has locked it down? So what? How is that any different from the last several years where competitors have had NFC and payment support? Why is the upcoming year suddenly going to backfire them right at a time where service providers will likely be questioning whether it's a good idea to promote a system which can't be used on Apple's much advertised phone?
I'm no fan of Apple, but you can't argue that they aren't strategically clever bastards.
That NFC will be made available via jailbreak, I do not doubt.
That it will happen quite that *fast*, I do doubt. Apple has gotten really good at lockdown.
Note that Lockdown != Security. Security means preventing unauthorized access. If you can't even authorize *yourself* to get access, it's either not "security" or it's not your device (or both).
If you want NFC, go with Samsung, or HTC, or Nokia, or one of the many other phone OEMs who have been including NFC hardware and software that lets you use it for years now.
And I'm sure we'll all be very eager to make use of the third party mobile payment options made available for your jailbroken iPhone on Cydia, courtesy of a bunch of hackers you've never heard of before.
Also a valid point. I do a fair bit of phone hacking, but am very cautious about what I install from whom (it helps that I can decompile apps pretty well by now). Most people aren't, and somebody is going to want to take advantage of that.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
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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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.
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