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Apple Pay Has a Siri Problem (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Katherine Boehret of The Verge reports multiple issues -- systematic, as well as general unawareness among vendors -- with Apple Pay. Citing instances from her own experience, she noted issues when using Apple Pay at McDonald's, Pret A Manger, and New York City cabs. From her report, "If I buy something at one of the wrong registers, the cashier must log out of it and log on at the right register before re-entering my purchase so I can use Apple Pay. This has happened at least a dozen times." She adds, "When a tool like Apple Pay works, it's like magic. You lift your phone, use fingerprint recognition to confirm the purchase, and walk away. The Wallet app in iOS shows you a list of your recent transactions, and adding credit cards is a simple process. But if Apple Pay fails enough times or isn't accepted at enough places, people forget it exists or think it's not worth trying to use. It's a lot like Siri in that way: too many failed attempts and you'll never open it again -- at least not on purpose."
I was puzzled about the headline for a while. Because Siri has had the opposite effect from that claimed.
At first when Siri came out, it didn't work very well - so I didn't use it much.
But over time I've used it more and more. Part of it is because every time you get new hardware, you simply try new things and over time I've found what things work well for me in Siri, and so I do use it quite often now.
The same is true of ApplePay. The ability to use it may be limited now, and there may be some failures. But with every new phone, or AppleWatch purchase the desire to try it out renews - and over time more and more places will have working ApplePay terminals. In the end use will grow, because using it is so compelling for so many reasons (not the least of which is security).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"I use Android Pay at Trader Joe's regularly specifically because it's faster than using my chip card."
I have a card with NFC. It also takes 2 seconds, and I don't even have to unlock my phone.
Why on earth would I want to use my phone instead? I don't want to unlock my phone to make a payment. I don't want to have NFC enabled on it. I don't have to worry about whether my phone is charged. (Sometimes it doesn't make it to the end of the day, especially if I haven't charged it the night before, or made heavy use of it.)
It seems like American card technology is so far behind what the rest of the world is doing that using your phones actually feels like a step forward. It just seems like a problem looking for a solution.