Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, that's really cool. > In January 2020, Visa first showcased the power of “Tap to Phone,” an industry-first solution that transforms current generation Android smartphones and tablets into contactless point of sale terminals. Tap to Phone was Visa’s first offering that let sellers accept payments on the devices they already own, just by downloading an app. As of December 2021, there were more than 300,000 devices…
I am not quite at liberty or have the capability to fully explain all of it. But I can confirm Android is one of the main focus. We actually have a video that showcases the real-life usage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OE6OmVd6Fxw&feature=youtu.be A lot of what used to be done on Payment terminals are now done on the cloud.
Probably the most interesting story I read about the payment terminal space was about someone who happened to be working on an application/middleware integration and had figured out a cute way to use coroutines in C to (presumably/extrapolating a bit) multiplex the payment-online step while simultaneously settling the payment-offline step, so both could move forward simultaneously and the receipt could print almost immediately (in an era of dialup and maybe ISDN). The auditor who came out to validate and approve the middleware had a brain-BSOD and loudly protested that what he was seeing with his own eyes was not possible, and had to be convinced that the solution wasn't playing fast and loose with the spec requirements to do its thing :D
The payment terminal space seems like it was (and will probably remain for some time) an interesting engineering niche to work in (in terms of crazy application integration and whatnot). Been curious about it for a while with all the janky flickering I see on the screen when the receptionist swipes my healthcare card at the doctor's office (which can process both bank cards and healthcare cards though what looks like a custom application). It'll be very interesting to see how the banking space moves to the cloud and off-the-shelf consumer devices start to replace proprietary terminals and whatnot (and then other industries slowly follow suit, maybe, in a decade or so). I note the press release mentions this infrastructure is available in Australia, but I incidentally haven't seen this in person yet (two years on). Will definitely be keeping an eye out now, and I obviously need to start shopping at more interesting places :P
Thanks for taking the time to share about this!