161–170 of 225 posts
Japan has a flourishing NFC payment ecosystem, and it's strange it's completely left out on this announcement. Would they have given early access and bundled the Suica app for instance, they could have boasted millions of users from the get go. I wonder if the upcoming API is even compatible with the Felica standard, but that would be a weird thing to do.
I really hope this doesn't end up fragmenting the NFC payments space. Only Apple Pay is accepted in one place, and only Google Wallet is accepted in another. Both of these technologies work with contactless card readers, let's just stick with that.
I live in a country where banks tend to come up with similar payment technologies at the same time; one example is the Chipknip vs Chipper, both bank card technologies for putting pre-paid amounts of cash on the card to be used to pay without having to enter a PIN or the longish time it took for a regular card payment to process. Didn't take long for the payment terminals to support both platforms.
ATM we've got a similar fight going on; a few banks have contactless payments now, but one bank is going for NFC payments via (very specific models of) smartphones (Samsung Galaxy models; I gathered they're using an already deprecated API/technology for that). But the same argument applies; both technologies use NFC, so all it needs to work is a firmware upgrade.
No-contact payment is exactly the kind of secure piece of engineering we needed. Especially after the iCloud debacle. /s
The U.S. is one of the last places to get this.
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The cynic in me winces when thinking of the mess all the banks and interested companies would make trying to get together and build a payment standard. Just look at the terrible mess of stuff like OFX.
Bitcoin might be a way around this. Also it might not be necessary for the involved parties to get together. They could release different protocols. And then the lesser used will be forgotten (like gopher is forgotten today) and the more frequent used will survive (like http has survived). Update: Why the downvotes?
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Google doesn't cause bloatware, Carriers and Handset makers do. One of the many consequences of OSS, people can fork and bloat to their heart's content. Also, I haven't had one issue with software updates on my Nexus 5 (which indeed comes bloatware free). If I recall correctly, wasn't the iOS7 update a shit show?
If I recall correctly, wasn't the iOS7 update a shit show? Not sure what you're referring to. I'm happily using iOS7 on a iPhone 4 (a 4 year old phone) to this day.
Japan has a flourishing NFC payment ecosystem, and it's strange it's completely left out on this announcement. Would they have given early access and bundled the Suica app for instance, they could have boasted millions of users from the get go. I wonder if the upcoming API is even compatible with the Felica standard, but that would be a weird thing to do.
It was left out of the announcement the same way Xerox was left out of the claim that Apple invented the mouse.
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If I recall correctly, wasn't the iOS7 update a shit show? Not sure what you're referring to. I'm happily using iOS7 on a iPhone 4 (a 4 year old phone) to this day.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2013/10/17/apple-ios-7-pr...
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Looks like Apple's commission is ~15-25 BPS for participating banks (from those banks): "The biggest “surprise” over last 2 months is that Apple has squeezed 15-25bps from the 5-6 participating banks at launch (C, BAC, COF, JPM, Amex and perhaps WFC)." http://blog.starpointllp.com/blog/?p=3855
BPS?
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You might not remember this, but that's exactly what originally happened. You had CompuServe mail, and Prodigy mail, and AOL mail, and any number of internal mail systems at different companies. There was not a single mail format or agreed upon address space. Getting mail from one system to another was a huge pain.
That's not how it "originally happened." Perhaps you're too young to remember the days before AOL and CompuServe, but email was being used more than a decade before those services. When those services started bringing messagint to consumers, yes, they had some proprietary set-ups but that was not how it "originally happened" -- that was a short-term glitch in the much longer and more open history of email.
That said, no one else was using it back then unless you worked military or university. Once it started to commercialize, then you had all the walled gardens. So although you're technically correct, BBS's were still the majority of the way we were connecting back then.
ApplePay is only on iPhone 6. This means that the availability rate for this technology will get into (tens of) millions in a couple of years, based on the update cycle with the phone carriers. Realistically we're talking 2-4 yrs. Plenty of time for providers to get acquainted with the technology and to integrate it into their retail systems. For developers it would be interesting to see how the API looks like and if…
Well it's already available through Stripe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8292026 - so I'm pretty sure there's good news ahead :)
more info: https://developer.apple.com/apple-pay/