Apple Plans iPhone for Japan With Tap-to-Pay for Subways
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
For a long time Android phones had the lead when it comes to paying digitally with phones in Japan and Korea. Their open NFC API allows for all sort of cool things like reading the balance of your card.
Japan has FeliCa more or less everywhere. Close to all IC cards are based around it and even in the time before smartphones, people in Japan were already able to pay with their feature phones which featured FeliCa chips. Nowadays you still need a special Android phone that supports it, though lately you can also get Samsung ones.
In Korea there are luckily close to no FeliCa terminals but still an iPhone is useless.
Providers here in Japan even started selling "NFC cases" that you put your iPhone in which then connects via bluetooth with the phone -- just so you can pay with your phone.
Bringing this in will be a huge deal. I know a lot of people who pick Android purely because they can pay with it. There are even a lot of people who have 2 phones, one iPhone that is their main phone and one purely for paying digitally.
Why not just carry the iPhone and a traditional card?
I would love if my bank just had a way to provide their own wallet solution on iOS but currently there is no way :(
Apple has a habit of introducing something very locked down and slowly adding features and opening up. We've been seeing this particularly in extensions recently and we've finally got some Siri support, if only in specific domains.
"Providing simple access to the NFC antenna by banking applications would fundamentally diminish the high level of security Apple aims to have on our devices"
[1] http://fortune.com/2016/08/11/apple-pay-tech-banks-security/
Or (and this seems REALLY probable) people make apps to 'help' you pay or track you spending and pay/etc. But they now have very sensitive banking data so that's insecure.
How about CurrenC or Walmart or some other company makes their own NFC payment thing on a different standard that isn't compatible with standard terminals. Now anyone who uses that new payment system is vulnerable to any bugs in that implementation as opposed to a very well tested system like the current NFC stuff (which I'm sure has shortcomings, but at least is well understood).
So? You can already do that. You can put an NFC shell around your phone which connects with bluetooth and that is being done already. You can touch an Android phone or anything else. Same story.
Used it last week with Apple Pay on my Phone, worked great!
Do be aware that if your phone battery runs out you may have to pay a penalty fare.
It's also worth priming your device (double tap home button from lock screen) and authenticating before you reach the gate. You don't want to hold up the 50 stressed commuters behind you fiddling with your phone.
Sure, you might claim that I'm more likely to forget my Oyster than my phone, but I'm also much less likely to run out of power on the Oyster.
This "contactless phone payment" seems more like a gimmick than anything else
I actually had to do all of these things, because the first set of machines I ran into (and then used to purchase an Oyster card) didn't have signs about being able to use contactless now.. all of those signs were around the corner :-)
London is lucky enough to (at least for the underground) allow cash or EFT fares at the stations, in some hostile cities like Sydney you cannot catch a bus without a pre-purchased multi rider card which you can only buy from certain outlets.. you can not pay cash on board. Combining the inefficiencies of avoiding cash on rides with the global standard of contact less payments makes total sense to me
A phone replaces all this just like FiveStars replaced carrying point cards.
Phones and contactless payments actually do the fare-capping calculations slightly differently - if you do a "commute into London, then around London a bunch, then back" travel pattern, it can purchase a virtual central-London travelcard in the middle of the day, and adjust the commute-in payment retroactively. If you want that fare treatment with Oyster then you need to get the travelcard option loaded on it in advance.
> or contactless
modestly better security
- I normally have my phone in my hand anyway. - My phone is in a pocket by it's self, so there is less risk of pulling out keys, coins, or notes along with my wallet. - I have many contact-less cards, so would have to pull the right one out of my wallet. - I would then have to put everything back, and go back to getting out my phone. - I get an apple pay notification ever evening when my card is charged, so I can easily tell if I have been over charged and get a refund.
Is this something Apple could conceivably add into an iOS point release? Or is the chip the controls the NFC in the iPhone probably hardcoded to what it does now and not capable of being adapted (like a software radio wood) to a different protocol?
Even if the phone could do it with a software update, is this one of those things where that wouldn't be allowed because their implementation probably wouldn't match the required security specs (Wikipedia seems to say that there is some special crypto on the cards which they may not want in software).
Also, the article mentions mass transit navigation is coming for Maps. If that happens I'll get rid of Google Maps, which is almost useless as it now forces me to log in before doing anything useful.
Japanese IC card compatibility diagram: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ICCard_Connection_en...
It's still useful without logging in, searches and directions still work fine, they just have a big ugly prompt telling you to log-in. Just ignore it. The main functional things missing are stars, offline, and the personalized suggestion things that appear when you tap search boxes (which regrettably includes recent search history, probably the biggest thing missing from the not-signed-in experience).
(disclaimer etc: I work on google maps for iOS)
You work on it, why not change that? :)
Interesting, this was the problem I was having, directions and/or directions from search results weren't working if I wasn't logged in. I just tried again and there's no problem, as you said.
My wallet was pretty fat and I had no problems tapping in and out with the card in my closed wallet. My phone had the ability to use Pasmo but I felt a lot safer banging my wallet against the gate every day instead of banging my phone against it.
My phone is usually already in my hand :)
Nottingham, for instance, has had contactless cards for transport for years.
There's an array of confusing different options (some cards will work only on City buses, some will work on any bus but not the tram, some will charge extra when you use the tram, but others won't, their ranges cover different parts of Nottingham etc).
But once you've got your head around that, it works fine.
I ask because I've already seen iPhone cases like this in Japan. I use one with my Clipper card.
I too have seen this kind of product in Japan. The downside is that the case gets thick, the design is limited, and it doesn't look cool. As a former user for using Suica app of feature phones, the case product is apparently not optimal.
IMO users who put their phones in their pockets would gain the most benefit (mostly men I think). Women, especially in Japan, generally wear clothes that have no pockets and the phones are inside the handbags, which will have less benefit. It is not much different taking the card case or a phone from your handbag.
I have seen a brand handbag that has an inner pocket in the bottom to hold a Suica card. To use it, you just put the handbag on top of the ticket gate. This kind of product looks more suited to women in Japan.
It's also trivial to cancel your virtual if your phone/watch is stolen, as it's just a unique hash. You can then continue to use your physical card, or re-register it.
(As an aside, I've spent years with a Pasmo train card (and required shielding sheet) duct-taped to the the back of my stupid iphone...)