Comment by alwaysanon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alwaysanon | Hacker News Reader

The issue that Google Pay has is that they don't block the bank apps from doing their own payments via the NFC hardware like Apple does. And, as such, the banks here in Australia all opt to do their own tap and pay (https://www.commbank.com.au/digital-banking/tap-and-pay.html) as they want to 'own' the experience.

They fought the good fight against Apple for awhile - not least of which that they didn't want to pay Apple a percentage of each transaction. But, they eventually all caved to Apple Pay as it was the only way to get it on iPhones which have a majority (56%) marketshare here and people were citing it as a reason why they were changing to the (usually smaller) banks that did offer it.

I am kind of glad they did as I really like the Apple Pay experience and trust the to get it right more than the bank's very hit-and-miss mobile app teams...

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/04/28/westpac-australian-bank...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/861532/australia-mobile-...

Australian bank cards like Westpac work fine in Google Pay, its not like they're locked into bank apps.

The bigger problem with Google pay is that it's too slow to open now after the rewrite. It's a time critical app, you're holding up people waiting in line.

The moment I downloaded the new version, without even having used Gpay for years — I knew — I knew they used some web-based or write-once bullshit just by the latency in the tab swipes alone, I can discern it distinctly and am sensitive to these deficits in performance (unfortunately).

Then I thought, "ah shit" searched "Flutter Gpay" and sure enough.

Sigh. When will they learn.

Ads rescued Dart from dying, because when Chrome abandoned the project, then just had gone through the GWT to Dart rewrite.

Flutter then gave Dart extra resources by picking it instead of JavaScript.

Since then they have been on a crusade to keep Flutter relevant.

For me it isn't a coincidence that Jetpack Composer was born as Flutter was getting increasing adoption.

Except there is a big difference between Java/Kotlin and anything that uses NDK, outside graphics rendering, every OS API call on Android needs to go through either JNI or Android IPC.

Even if it is own special flavour of Java, with Kotlin toppings, and many love to bash it, because managed, the irony is that all the alternatives are much worse in device performance.

Mostly because NDK is only meant for games and native methods, so everything else needs to go through JNI all the time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com