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Apple joins the NFC party, providing iOS developers the ability to read NFC tags

developer.ibm.com

41–50 of 119 posts

Re: Apple joins the NFC party, providing iOS developers the ability to read NFC tags

#41
post #2

What took so long?

Some core group obviously cared enough Apple decided it was in their interest. I'd be interested in knowing who it was.

Option 2: they plan to start using it themselves in future products for pairing instead/with BTLE or maybe for some sort of in-store display.

Re: Apple joins the NFC party, providing iOS developers the ability to read NFC tags

#42
If anyone's wondering, the API is significantly more limited than the Android NFC API (which having used it extensively over the last 2 years I can say is very pleasant).

Still, it's better than nothing and it represents a huge opportunity for NFC tag providers (where I work). We've been waiting for this for about 4 years.

Re: Apple joins the NFC party, providing iOS developers the ability to read NFC tags

#43
post #24

At first I was excited, but then I read the docs: > Read only > Only supports NDEF formatted tags > Available only on iPhone 7 and newer Basically, this is even more crippled than what WP 8.0 did five years ago (and back then I thought it was too crippled to be useful)

I wonder if there is any technical reason for requiring iPhone 7. I thought iPhone 6 and iPhone 6s also had some kind of NFC hardware present to support Apple Pay.

Re: Apple joins the NFC party, providing iOS developers the ability to read NFC tags

#44

Neat, but I've yet to see a single NFC use case that gets me anywhere near as excited as this author. Amiibo is a cool concept but obviously limited. I've used some writable tags for android settings changes and such years ago, but it just doesn't seem useful to me. Anyone know a killer use case I'm missing here?

In Australia most over the counter payments are done with NFC cards. Some banks allow this to be done with a wave of your phone so you don't need to carry credit cards at all.

Re: Apple joins the NFC party, providing iOS developers the ability to read NFC tags

#45
post #38
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked on some prototypes years ago on android that handled a payment from a contactless bank card on your phone. So in the payments space: - phone as a payment terminal - peer to peer payments I'm sure there's more than that but they're the low hanging fruit

Unfortunately it's read only so that stuff won't be coming to iOS.

I don't believe you need to write to the card in order to do payments. You send byte streams and it generates OTPs.

Re: Apple joins the NFC party, providing iOS developers the ability to read NFC tags

#46

Neat, but I've yet to see a single NFC use case that gets me anywhere near as excited as this author. Amiibo is a cool concept but obviously limited. I've used some writable tags for android settings changes and such years ago, but it just doesn't seem useful to me. Anyone know a killer use case I'm missing here?

Most modern cameras have, for the last couple years, used NFC to quickly and easily transmit photos from the camera to the phone. From what I understand, on Android this works pretty effectively. On iOS, however, weak NFC implementation means that one must use a kind of janky WiFi transfer system. It works, but it's kind of difficult to use and not very elegant.

Are you sure it's transmitting over NFC? I thought NFC is quite a limited bandwidth connection. Maybe it's creating the initial connection over NFC and doing the actual transfer over wifi?

Re: Apple joins the NFC party, providing iOS developers the ability to read NFC tags

#47
post #42

If anyone's wondering, the API is significantly more limited than the Android NFC API (which having used it extensively over the last 2 years I can say is very pleasant). Still, it's better than nothing and it represents a huge opportunity for NFC tag providers (where I work). We've been waiting for this for about 4 years.

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.

Re: Apple joins the NFC party, providing iOS developers the ability to read NFC tags

#48

Neat, but I've yet to see a single NFC use case that gets me anywhere near as excited as this author. Amiibo is a cool concept but obviously limited. I've used some writable tags for android settings changes and such years ago, but it just doesn't seem useful to me. Anyone know a killer use case I'm missing here?

Don't forget, it's not just about consumer applications. Anywhere you might use a QR code or traditional barcode, but you don't want to have to worry about the barcode becoming obscured or worn with use. I know we've thought about using them to track vehicles and some kinds of parts in the automotive retail company I work for, and there's probably plenty of other industrial applications for them.

Re: Apple joins the NFC party, providing iOS developers the ability to read NFC tags

#49

Neat, but I've yet to see a single NFC use case that gets me anywhere near as excited as this author. Amiibo is a cool concept but obviously limited. I've used some writable tags for android settings changes and such years ago, but it just doesn't seem useful to me. Anyone know a killer use case I'm missing here?

It reminds me of the ridiculous excitement over iBeacons when Apple announced their proprietary NFC-like tech a few years ago. Virtually every iOS dev I know bought some cheap iBeacons thinking "wow this is so cool" and never ended up building anything useful. I wasn't immune either, as the abandoned iBeacon in my desk drawer attests to.

There's undoubtedly great use cases for NFC on phones (payments, travel passes, hotel room keys etc), but it's also a technology that often seems to attract developers solely because it seems 'cool', not because they have a problem that can be solved better with NFC than without it.

Re: Apple joins the NFC party, providing iOS developers the ability to read NFC tags

#50
post #43
post #24

At first I was excited, but then I read the docs: > Read only > Only supports NDEF formatted tags > Available only on iPhone 7 and newer Basically, this is even more crippled than what WP 8.0 did five years ago (and back then I thought it was too crippled to be useful)

I wonder if there is any technical reason for requiring iPhone 7. I thought iPhone 6 and iPhone 6s also had some kind of NFC hardware present to support Apple Pay.

IIRC, because the payment terminals have their own power source, previous iPhone generations lacked the induction coils necessary to support passive NFC tags. Presumably they were added to the iPhone 7?
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