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Apple unveils contactless payments via Tap to Pay on iPhone

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Re: Apple unveils contactless payments via Tap to Pay on iPhone

#701

Post by fennecfoxy »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #478
Kognito wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven’t used cash since the pandemic started in the UK. Covid encouraged even market traders and street food vendors to move to contactless payments - which were just about the final holdouts.

NZ'er here - haven't used cash for years, except when you sell something online or buy drugs. Spend is kinda hilarious - in supermarket checkout "can I pay $150 in cash and remaining using card?" just so you don't have to deal with coins.

Also a kiwi (although living in UK) I've used contactless since it was first available in NZ (ages ago) but when I returned late 2019 I found that contactless was no longer accepted at certain places, like liquor stores. Too many munters nicking cards to buy booze with I guess.

I can't wait to live in a 100% cashless society but I do think that the process should be refined (especially for phone payments).

Atm I tap and often have no idea if I'm really paying exactly what I should be. Credit card/debit numbers should only ever be temporary and for a given amount to a given merchant (like how my bank requires generating an OTP when adding a new payee). Confirmation that we are paying x merchant £y is definitely required.

Current system is really weak in that if someone has my credit/debit number they can arbitrarily charge me, in the UK if someone has my sort code + bank they can use that at a business to create a debit request and I get arbitrarily charged.

Re: Apple unveils contactless payments via Tap to Pay on iPhone

#702

Post by acd10j »

tl wrote: post #579
Angostura wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We saw how it took 10+ years and a dominating market position for Apple to show their claws with controlling 3rd parties with the App Store. M Really? I thought Apple's position was fairly consistent and it took 10+ years for the companies using the App Store to get antsy.

That's a fairly revisionist view of history. Large partners had earlier had special pricing (ex: Netflix) lax enforcement of rules (ex: Facebook). Blowups where Apple presumed the right to levy a fee are also well known (Amazon book sales, Uber fares). The smaller fish got consistently screwed and no one was happy per se, but the sheer stupidity of Apple's recent actions do not help matters. For example, the app stor…

Yes, Apple is increasingly competing with Governments of the worlds, in taxation of digital ecosystems, I am sure as they sabotage this market by these steep taxation, their will be blow back from governments as well after lobbying form business, They are not so small now like Nintendo that they can get away with this steep cuts. Problem is that governments will retaliate by arm twisting apple to approve third party app stores, which will be bad for whole iPhone ecosystem.

Re: Apple unveils contactless payments via Tap to Pay on iPhone

#703

Post by breakpointalpha »

Fun fact, I was out late last night at a local upscale gas station. Think clean, well lit, and modern touchscreen sandwich ordering. NOT a dirty, broken down place. You'd expect the tech to work flawlessly in a place like this.

I was second in line behind a younger guy who asked to use his iPhone tap to pay, the clerk shrugged and pointed to the card scanner. Guy taps his phone and the scanner bricks, hard. The young man was somewhat embarrassed for holding up the line and sheepishly dug some old school greenbacks out of his pockets to pay before slinking out the door.

The clerk confusedly tried without luck to recover the register, before giving up and asking me and the other 6 people in line to move to another register. I had a little mini panic because all I had was a card, no cash, and about $20 worth of snacks. What do we do when electronics fail?

Re: Apple unveils contactless payments via Tap to Pay on iPhone

#704

Post by ThePowerOfFuet »

Crosseye_Jack wrote: post #649
globalise83 wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but there is nothing to prevent completing biometric or PIN authentication on your own phone once you have tapped on the merchant's is there?

For me personally, I only use my real plastic when my battery is low on my phone. So you have to account for times may not have their phone with them. My bank allows for location based security. If my phone is not near the location the card is being used I then have to use chip and pin instead of contactless (dead battery, poor cell service, unable to get a decent location fix because of the building, all these can t…

Why are you allowing your bank to know where you are 24/7? Is inputting a PIN really so bad?

Re: Apple unveils contactless payments via Tap to Pay on iPhone

#705

Post by munk-a »

profmonocle wrote: post #700
lmm wrote: post #687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would have worked, every other card terminal we'd used in the country still supported magstripe, and I saw that her machine had a scanner. She didn't say the reader was broken or anything, just refused to try. Just because the terminal has a magstripe reader on doesn't mean her merchant account provider accepts it. Plenty don't, or some transfer the liability to the store in that case. > If the card hadn't worke…

> In 2014 a card that doesn't have a chip might as well be broken. Chips were basically non-existent on US cards in 2014.

That's true - but they were widespread pretty much everywhere else in the world including Norway. Up here in Canada we tend to say "Do you take interac?" instead of credit - but if credit is just the way people talk about chip-n-pin in Norway the understanding might be that walking into a store with a non-chip-n-pin card and asking for credit is dishonest.

I'm not Norwegian but it'd be pretty similar up here in Canada at this point - if your POS terminal gets damaged and your mag stripe reader breaks there isn't really a big reason to immediately shutter your store and replace it.

Re: Apple unveils contactless payments via Tap to Pay on iPhone

#706

Post by Crosseye_Jack »

ThePowerOfFuet wrote: post #704
Crosseye_Jack wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me personally, I only use my real plastic when my battery is low on my phone. So you have to account for times may not have their phone with them. My bank allows for location based security. If my phone is not near the location the card is being used I then have to use chip and pin instead of contactless (dead battery, poor cell service, unable to get a decent location fix because of the building, all these can t…

Why are you allowing your bank to know where you are 24/7? Is inputting a PIN really so bad?

Its done on your device, not on banks side iirc, but its an optional thing you can opt into if you wish, thats not the default config when opening an account (can also be toggled on/off at will in the app, so i'm not too worried about it tbh).

Re: Apple unveils contactless payments via Tap to Pay on iPhone

#707

Post by bduerst »

bobberkarl wrote: post #648
pdpi wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contactless bank cards were widespread in the UK before Apple or Google had their own payment systems. I think the "real story", as it were, is that the banking industry held contactless payments way more than Apple ever did.

This is not true! Sorry for the passion but i was involved in the mobile payment scene at the time. It was not the banks halting the development of mobile payment. It was: 1- Apple 2- MNOs (Mobile Network Operators) 3- Samsung Apple closed off the iphone NFC api which dried up VC funding in the mobile payment scene. This is one of the reason we have QR Codes everywhere today, and not NFC tags. To securely process mob…

>Apple closed off the iphone NFC api which dried up VC funding in the mobile payment scene. This is one of the reason we have QR Codes everywhere today, and not NFC tags.

Yep, this was my experience as well, working in the NFC space at the time. Apple also basically forced the whole IoT space to start focusing on QR codes instead of NFC tags, because they were lagging technologically with the iPhone.

Re: Apple unveils contactless payments via Tap to Pay on iPhone

#708

Post by bduerst »

Flimm wrote: post #686
bobberkarl wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not true! Sorry for the passion but i was involved in the mobile payment scene at the time. It was not the banks halting the development of mobile payment. It was: 1- Apple 2- MNOs (Mobile Network Operators) 3- Samsung Apple closed off the iphone NFC api which dried up VC funding in the mobile payment scene. This is one of the reason we have QR Codes everywhere today, and not NFC tags. To securely process mob…

You're replying to someone talking about contactless card payments, and you're talking about mobile payments. They are not the same thing.

GP originally replied to my comment about contactless payments, not cards. In the US their adoption was synonymous.

Re: Apple unveils contactless payments via Tap to Pay on iPhone

#709

Post by munk-a »

profmonocle wrote: post #641
munk-a wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is legal oversight and reporting required from conventional cab companies. And yes this was very much from the early days of Uber - when people cheered on the fact that they identified regulators and refused to book rides for them so they couldn't formally record violations.

Oh holy christ, I hadn't heard of them doing that. Doesn't shock me, sadly.

Oh, a source[1] - this is why I'm extremely skeptical of the goodness of disrupting. Building a new competitor that can straight up out compete existing monopolies is one thing but beating existing companies by refusing to play by the same rules removes the power of law from society.

It was super depressing at the time to hear the Libertarian crowd come out in staunch defense of this program.

1. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/uber-uses-secret-pr...

Re: Apple unveils contactless payments via Tap to Pay on iPhone

#710

Post by pmart123 »

sn1de wrote: post #448
monkeynotes wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am surprised Apple didn't make this a closed system and compete with Square for small businesses.

It competes with anyone selling point of sale hardware. I think Square falls into that camp, no? I wouldn't want to be in that space right now. I don't see how this doesn't usurp a big chunk of their market since it isn't even a decision between buy this or buy that, but buy that or just use the thing already in my pocket.

Square sells hardware, but losing money on that. I don't believe it is intended to compete with payment processors providing hardware, but more so commoditizes it/flattens existing players in cases where a POS terminal system isn't needed.
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