Apple to face EU antitrust charge over NFC chip
reuters.com
reuters.com
Every 3rd question on the Twint forums is a request to implement payment via watch but that ain't happening as long as Apple block this and they will not enable a feature only for Android users.
Can I ask why not? Seems a shame to leave such a large user base on the table.
However, it didn't actually work very well. You have to do several button presses and taps on the phone, during which it launches very slowly, and once you get to the payment part it often failed for whatever reason. "Multiple cards detected", "payment denied", whatever. It was quicker to fish the card out of my wallet and much less stressful.
PS: The card I paid with when it failed was the exact same card that I had linked to Samsung Pay, there were no balance issues :)
My Samsung Galaxy watch has had an EKG sensor for longer than it has taken for Apple to add their own. It's technologically superior, and also has a circular face instead of being a big square block, and has better battery life since I can get a good 2 days or more out of it. But ultimately it is also as bad as Apple because it only works well with Samsung's ecosystem.
The whole point about Apple (for decades) is vertical integration, building hardware and software specifically optimized for the said hardware. That’s what Apple is in it’s core, that’s why they’ve been revolutionizing industries and that’s why iPhones, iPads and MacBooks are most performant and battery efficient consumer devices for years.
It’s like saying - “There aren’t any good consoles really. Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo aren’t good console manufacturers when their consoles only know how to talk to other PlayStation/Xbox/Nintendo services and actively prevent compatibility with other systems.”
To be fair that point did improve in the last few years. In the past, cross-platform online play wasn't even a thing.
They're opening up because they're competing against eachothers, while Apple is doing whatever it can to avoid open standards with their devices. Unless the standard itself is too big to avoid and not adopting it would put them at a disadvantage.
> MacBooks are most performant
Huh? MacBooks have the same performance as corresponding Windows laptops. That only slightly changed with M1, but it doesn't seem anything to do with vertical integration, and rather just the result of buying out 5nm production.
Also there is complete lack of models with Nvidia GPUs, so they are a lackluster in graphics.
Whether or not that's a worthwhile tradeoff: I dunno! No doubt it depends on exact numbers, lifetime expected value, potential word-of-mouth damage, etc.
Apple literally copied half of the Android long after stuff made it to Android. They've even copied Swype keyboard like 10 years later!
Light up a fire under their feet, have the userbase put some pressure on Apple if they're unhappy about the situation.
Since 2019, more and more banks have started enabling regular mobile payments, so it's going to be interesting to see where that leaves Twint (I've never used it, so I have no idea what reasons one would have to use it over NFC payments, other than lack of support by one's card provider).
https://www.moneyland.ch/en/apple-pay-google-pay-swiss-banks...
The biggest "scam" going on now is the banks specifically Visa pushing their garbage Debit card. For users it seems great as it's cheaper no fee thing, however for vendors it is a nightmare. The fees are astronomical over regular credit cards yet they have to accept them if they want to accept Visa's credit card. Visa found another legal loop hole they can milk and they are going all the way.
The potential fees involved would be more of a concern for the vendors, it seems to me. Are you saying that Visa debit cards have higher fees than their credit cards? My understanding was that usually it's the other way around.
Visa has higher fees not for the customer but for the vendors. It's specifically a problem in Switzerland where the "Maestro" bank cards are being replaced with Visa Debit which is being pushed by the banks. The benefit for the custom is they can use those visa cards online but the fees at the store for the vendor are up to 260 times higher. [1]
[1] https://www.srf.ch/news/schweiz/neue-debitkarten-visa-und-ma...
It's probably why NFC is not universal on Android as well.
In France, you can't store a metro card on your iPhone, because Apple won't open up NFC. You can do it on Android.
Yet, I don't want banks to drop Apple Pay support, and force you to use their poorly coded app for payments. Imagine having many cards, for personal and business, joint cards and foreign cards, thankfully many banks on Android end up supporting GPay, but many still force you to use their custom app and don't give you a choice. How many years did your bank take before adopting Touch ID? For me and some of you, it's measured in years.
Apple shouldn't be able to block third-party NFC use, but should be entitled to force banks to make Apple Pay-compatible equivalents (when applicable) in addition to whatever custom stuff they decide to roll out.
Without a doubt, they'd roll their own fragmented/compromised implementation of contactless payments on iOS, if they had the choice.
Not quite the same, but so many large corps in Canada don't offer Wallet integration for their relevant products (loyalty cards, points balances, etc.) They instead have their own app for these, and let me tell you: they are all garbage.
It's incredible convenient. No need to use the fare machines -- just top up using the Apple Wallet app. Sounds like it's coming to Paris soon: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/01/06/apple-to-support-paris-...
Which metro cards? Navigo have been supported all year.
Apple's hardware doesn't allow for arbitrary card emulation - the logic has to run inside the Secure Enclave, and AFAIK that is an atomic block of firmware shipped along with the OS. No third party code allowed.
But they have added that secure enclave support for the various metro card networks, including "express pay" where NFC functions like metro cards will work even with the phone powered down due to low battery.
My understanding is that do to patent royalties wanted by the underlying Calypso system, it was not merged into ISO 14443 and deviates in a few ways.
Apple has historically implemented more of their NFC stack in hardware than other implementations, so there may be limitations as a result of the with communication with a card reader.
Note that Apple Pay also has a very low limit on the number of cards that you can add, presumably because each card occupies an actual hardware slot. In the original iPhone SE, that's only 8 cards, and Apple Cash (the debit card) gets counted as one of those (unless you're remove it manually), then if you have Apple Card (the credit card), presumably it takes another slot, so you're only left with just 6 slots for any other contactless credit or debit card.
How's such a low limit good for the consumer? If you only have 6 cards in total, might as well simply carry all of them in your wallet anyways; I do that already.
Android Pay and Google Pay don't have such tiny, restrictive and anticompetitive limits. I have like 20 different credit cards as contactless in Google Pay without any issues, which is very convenient if you care about bonus categories; same was for Android Pay before it got rebranded as Google Pay.
Plus, in Android, you can even select a third party app to be used for contactless in the "Default apps" — "Tap & pay" settings instead of Google Pay; I know Wells Fargo used to have contactless support in their own app at one point, for example, and was selectable there.
Because having it in hardware means it fetches faster. That’s why I use Apple Pay. The other apps are slower than swiping.
Android's contactless doesn't require network connectivity. You can switch and use any of the added cards without having any network connection.
I do of course have many more cards; one of the downsides of the credit system in the US is how you have to game it to improve your credit. But for the most part those stay in the drawer.
Because of travel I also have transferwise money anywhere card.
My airline and hotel cards aren't in Apple Pay because they're largely worthless in-person. Same for my Amazon credit card; 5% back on everything Amazon, but I don't need it physically with me ever.
Quite a few cards are worth having, but only in the sock drawer most of the time.
I think they originally didn't work with contactless Android Pay, maybe because the card number is different, but it's been fixed a few years ago. They also have the app-based ATM login, so I don't recall ever using the physical WF debit card in the last X years.
That's one way of looking at it. The other is that debt is priced in everything and you're just recouping part of it.
It's pretty f*cked.
For example, it often costs 3% or less to accept payment for a merchant, but there are many cards which offer rewards that can be valued at 7.5% cashback, or even higher values if you're into chic travel.
For example, many people have more than one of the same card, e.g., Chase Freedom is a popular example. By having 3 cards, you can increase the quarterly limit on the product by 3x — similar to using extra threads on a multicore CPU — it's still the same system, so there's no extra inconvenience. Since they're all from the same issuer, having any number of Chase cards is a fixed cost for the user, because all of them appear in a single account login, and can also be set to have identical due dates, too. Likewise, Google Pay and Chase have no limits to the number of cards you can add to a digital wallet, so, it works out there, too.
It's amazing how so many iPhone users project the perceived inconvenience of this approach, but there's actually no inconvenience for Android users, since Android's NFC is open and doesn't have any limits.
Source? I do not think any person reviewing people’s credit history would rate people higher for having 10 low barrier to entry revolving credit accounts rather than say 5 or even 3.
Different types of credit are weighted differently, so mortgage and auto and student and revolving credit card are not all seen the same, and I would not believe “more is better”, especially just for revolving credit lines for credit cards.
I recall seeing this in Credit Karma or maybe Experian's FreeCreditScore at one point (that you have to have 20 or 21 accounts for the best score), but cannot find it right now. I think it's a relatively well known number.
Here having no credit cards is best. Because not having to loan shows having the ability of being responsible financially.
Note: here in Europe we get no rewards or anything on credit cards. It's viewed more as a liability, not a virtue.
In fact my credit cards cost money in stamp duty, they don't ever gain me any.
So say if I spend $3000 a month, and pay it off every month in full, and my total credit limit is $10,000, they will ding me regardless of my payment history, because my utilization (30%+) is considered high. So if I want to maximize my credit score, it behooves me to get more cards (easiest way to increase total credit), and spread out the payments among them.
Assume you have a card for restaurants, one of travel, one for grocery’s, one for gas, one for entertainment and one catch all.
That’s 6. What else do you have a dedicated card for? 14 cards with sign up bonuses? All at the same time, each with minimum spending requirements to earn that bonus?
Let’s add some more. I have one card that pays $25 every quarter that I pay off in full every month so I use it once every month. I have a card with rotating categories. Even with multiple rotating categories I don’t see this going up past 12 cards.
Sure, why do I need my savings account in my apple pay? Why did I put the plastic savings card into my physical wallet? Because that's where all of my other plastic cards are.
"The digital wallet should be able to hold all of my cards, even the ones I use infrequently" would certainly be my expectation.
It's actually a really good idea, because it's a different account number they gets stored on the device, so, even if your hotel card is compromised because of the hotel leak, the copy in Google Pay will remain active and available. So, I could use it right away on the once-every-two-years bonus category without any extra hassle.
So in Denmark many see no reason to more than a single card.
BTW. We don't have a concept like "credit score" at all.
eg, Card A has no overseas transaction fees and has good exchange rate so I use it when travelling. Card B is same but I set a ridiculously low credit limit so I can use it in dodgy souvenir shops without worry. Card C gives airport lounge access. Card D gives free magazine and bottled water in the airport post-security areas. Card E grants access to clubhouses that are normally members-only, which I use for business meetings. Card F gets discounts for movie tickets, Card G to H gives free coffee upgrade from different chains, etc. And then there are a bunch that was pushed onto me when I got mortgage or a investment funds, that I never bothered to cancel since there's no annual fees and occasionally they'd have a promotion where it's actually useful.
I wouldn't want to carry all these physical cards, so I don't have them "in my wallet" per se, which is why it's nice to be able to add them all to my phone.
Normal people do not have 20 credit cards. Even people I know who have several cards, often only have a couple they actually use on a daily basis. This is not a real problem.
This is not even about credit cards. Debit counts, too. Say you have two bank accounts, an HSA account, one premium card, one business credit card, one everyday card, one… Oops, out of slots already!
It sounds like you're really happy with Apple products, and will simply change your life around them, instead of demanding something better. 6+ cards is probably already the average for many people.
I'd hazard most people have two or three cards tops.
For example, I have 11 Chase credit cards, and all of them are in Google Pay on Android. I almost never use the hotel ones; they simply provide other benefits for the annual fee, like the free hotel night for each annual fee renewal. But sometimes they do run bonus spend promotions, that's where once every year I can simply use those cards through Android/Google Pay on Android without having to worry about finding the physical card that I only use once a year.
This means anyone even slightly above average is already out.
Imagine if you weren't allowed to wear tall jeans just because you're above average. That's what Apple does on the technology front.
[0]: https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/what-is-credit-c...
People carrying all those cards to churn or min-max their rewards are already paying with the inconvenience of managing all those accounts.
All the Chase credits cards show up under a single login; you can pretty much simply login once a month a pay all 9 or 11 of them at once. Or setup auto-pay. Or change the due-date to be the exact same date for all of them, so you only have to login and pay exactly once a month.
I have all 11 of Chase credit cards in Google Pay. If I switch phones, they're already available for verification on the new phone, you don't have to type the whole number anymore. I keep all but 3 to 5 credit cards in a sock drawer; but I can still use any one of them 20 at any time thanks to Google Pay.
When I need to use any one of my 20 cards to make a purchase, simply scroll through and select, based on picture and/or description. If vendor doesn't accept contactless, simply use one of the 5 physical cards I do carry.
The only inconvenience is that it doesn't work on iPhone, and that's one of the reasons I don't use iPhone as a primary phone, because so many things don't work there.
Why wouldn't you want to add all the cards you have to your wallet? Because your $699 iPhone doesn't support the feature?
There's no single magic number thats your credit score, other than the one credit reference agencies provide, which no bank worth their salt uses, making that number meaningless.
Banks buy credit files from reference agencies, which contain hundreds of different data points for each individual. Then the bank use their own internal models to calculate credit risk, or identify customers they like. That model will be different at every bank, and for every class of product they sell.
If this wasn’t true, then there would be no differentiation between lenders, other than interest rate. Leaders use their own secret sauce models to help them identify and classify specific groups of individuals that meet their risk appetite. And they won’t just be optimising for repayment or profit, they’ll also be looking to ensure their loan book is highly diverse. Ensuring they’re not overexposed to big events (like, say, a global pandemic), which might disproportionately impact a subset of customers (such as people working in hospitality).
So the idea that 20 cards is some magic number for a good “credit score” is just crap. And grossly underestimates both the diversity and complexity of credit decisioning.
That basically represents the idea customer for a bank.
If you can add all of them to a tiny device, and they all come from just a few banks that provide a unified interface to manage 10 cards at a time, and/or set them all up for auto-pay, then why wouldn't you want to make the most out of all the offers and bonuses?
There are hardware limits on how many you can put in an iPhone, just like there are limits to how many you can stuff into a wallet. Most wallets won't fit 20 cards, either.
I fail to understand how can anyone claim that an 8-card limit in a digital wallet on a 32GB+ device is reasonable, when you can literally store more cards than that even in an average physical wallet.
And, again, Android's NFC and Google Pay have no such limits.
Loyalty cards are unlimited. I have dozens of those.
In Android Pay and now rebranded as Google Pay all contactless was and is unlimited. You never have to delete any card. You only have to re-verify the cards if you switch devices. That's literally how a digital wallet is meant to be, if you ask me.
None of your comments seem to show any realization that this is not a problem almost anyone faces. I do not have to delete and re-verify cards all the time — you do.
And I don't have to delete any cards either, because for my daily driver I use actual professional devices that run Android instead of the "Pro" gimmicks without Pro features that Apple makes. Apple Pay is useless, so they get what they deserve: $0.00 spend from me because I'm not using it just for one card when I can use all of my cards in Android.
It's mind boggling how people will go to such great lengths to defend such a silly 7-card limit. Or all these suggestions that imply that carrying 20 cards is impractical, when they literally all fit into any Google device of same size as an iPhone. This whole thread and the downvotes are really a travesty. You'd think people on HN would know better than ignore the obvious. But I guess Apple fans are toxic and stubborn regardless of the forum.
Casual reminder that you're not supposed to downvote comments you simply disagree with, but only comments that are incorrect or don't contribute to a healthy discussion. But the Apple fans don't seen to care about such etiquette, and the net score of anyone saying anything that's not positive of Apple appears to be in the negative even here on HN that's supposed to be free of such obvious bias and fanatism.
Also, this isn't a missing feature but an arbitrary limitation, so again, Apple doesn't need to "cater to it", just raise an int in the source code from 6 to 20 or whatever.
No, it's an element of the hardware design.
It's blatantly absurd to have that much extra security for something that's fundamentally insecure anyways.
Not to say there’s no legitimate use case for 8+ cards in Apple Pay, but I’m having a hard time envisioning it.
To the story itself: we’re at an interesting junction where your “phone” is absolutely a company’s product and they should be able to define the experience, but also becoming an essential utility in many societies where certain limitations are harmful. I’m still unsure where I land on some of these cases.
Well good for you. But there are tons of cards that give $ directly in your bank account instead of Amazon account and at a better rate as well. e.g. Chase Freedom has 5% cashback categories every quarter that can be converted into real dollars at 1:1 rate. So...
I just need one debit card and thats it.
I have also a credit card that is needed by car rentals. And use it only there.
And I don't carry around my card because it is something I can forget. And I always carry a phone, so why have two if I need only one. Not to mention limits on pinless payments are higher in Google/Apple pay.
What would you do if you need to rent a car, but your bank is down, and cannot authorise the payment?
The cards I have actually pay me back in rewards for having them. Why would I NOT have as many as they'll give me?
Most of my 20 cards come from just 3 issuers (Chase being the one who gave me the most cards), so, it's not even like it's even an issue from the management perspective, because each card is free (or even net negative cost) to own and operate, and it costs about the same amount of time to service them by the dozen as it would take to service just one of them.
This is end-of-the-world type scenario, you can prepare but should you go always prepared for it?
> The cards I have actually pay me back in rewards for having them. Why would I NOT have as many as they'll give me?
OK, that might be some countries specific, but in my country debit/credit (debits are way way more popular here) there are usually no rewards for paying and juggling cards to save 1-2% is not worth it - had once such card, after 6 months they resigned from such rewards and choosing card to use even on phone is a PITA instead of using the default one.
And this was just an exception, usually you don't get rewards unless you have an expensive credit card that gives you mile rewards, but for that you really need to use that card everywhere to make it worth it - so again no need for other cards.
This is EU-PL specific point of view.
I think a few years ago one UK bank had a downtime of a few days on their payment network. Wasn't that limited to a single bank? If you don't have to pay an annual fee for a credit card, why would you not at least have a few, to avoid such a scenario?
Plus, bank-specific individual account lockouts are far more common worldwide, or customer service and unlock department might be having technical issues. None of this is the end of the world for anyone who has several credit cards.
I use a single bank for the last 15 years, there was no issue with it that would cause me to not be able to use my money.
They usually have scheduler work during some weekend nights, and I don't remember any large scale issue besides that - for sure I didn't have a scenario where I was without money.
For such scenario it is better to have some cash (which I do, but for other reasons - e.g. paying nanny or some workers that don't accept card payments).
I stopped carrying cash like 10 years ago. Even banks themselves recommend having more than one card just in case an issue occurs, to ensure you're not left stranded.
European Union antitrust enforcement has support of may civil liberty and privacy organizations and political parties. Their main complaint is that they are not doing enough.
Vestager fights a popular fight, but she fights it badly. Almost everything significant she has tried to do has been blocked by courts or settled away. She’s Europe’s Eliot Spitzer.
Eh, privacy. A bit. The reason banks want you to use their app is they can collect more data than Apple passes along. I also doubt contactless payment would have the adoption it has among iOS users without Apple’s branding and marketing push.
There’s incredibly strict laws around banking privacy in NL (and most of the EU). My banks can’t even mine my transactions for any inference, except fraud. They need my approval to even categorize or track spending.
Frankly, if Apple's the alternative, I'd rather roll my own security. I have no interest in wasting my time trying to pick the lock on my golden handcuffs just to use my computer without being watched.
"For Messages in iCloud, if you have iCloud Backup turned on, your backup includes a copy of the key protecting your messages. This ensures you can recover your messages if you lose access to your Keychain and your trusted devices. When you turn off iCloud Backup, a new key is generated on your device to protect future messages and isn't stored by Apple." https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT202303
Apple's been fairly prominently resistant to government snooping of this nature, to the point of getting in a public fight with the FBI over it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93Apple_encryption_d...
The Snowden leaks indicate the two alternatives you suggest, Google and Microsoft, joined PRISM before Apple did, stating "98 percent of PRISM production is based on Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)
Eh, that was 2016.
Half a decade later and Apple has since kowtowed to the Chinese government to allow spying on iCloud user data. Despite their privacy-centric branding campaigns, Profits >> Privacy for Apple.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-ce...
If you're a Chinese citizen, you're surveilled by the Chinese government, regardless of which device you buy.
Google faced the same with project Dragonfly and employees chose to not kowtow to Chinese government spying.
Apple had a choice, and chose profits over privacy by spying for the CCP with it's software.
Unless I become a Chinese citizen/resident, Apple's dealings with China don't particularly concern me much.
Apple had a choice, and those chose to be able to operate in Chinese markets (including for manufacturing) over blatantly breaking Chinese law.
Apple's fight with the FBI over the San Bernardino shooter phone instance was made possible by them having legal recourse in the US to do so. Remember that Apple is only a corporation because the government allows them to be one.
Upset the CCP enough, you might not even get parts out of China to assemble elsewhere. Perhaps why Apple has invested in having multiple sources for all of their components, multiple manufacturing facilities in different countries, etc.
While also patting Apple on the back for privacy.
Maybe in the US. But hear in the EU contactless was a thing a decade before Apple Pay came along, and just about every merchant and bank card supported it for at least 5 years before Apple Pay.
Indeed I would say that Apple Pay wouldn’t have the adoption it does in the EU, if it wasn't for contactless providing all the infrastructure needed to power it. A point you can provide evidence for my comparing Apple Pay adoption in the US vs EU.
On your privacy point, you realise that banks get same amount of data about a transaction via the card networks, regardless of whether or not you use Apple Pay. The only party that looses any info is the merchant.
I don’t know the situation in the EU, given the privacy laws, but in the U.S., banks’ enhanced data from app-based contactless payments (on Android, obviously) sell at a premium to those through a scrubbed channel. The app picks up a lot more information, e.g. signals, location, device, clipboard, et cetera, than the payment transcript.
In the US theres a very clear financial incentive for banks to try and cut out card networks, and claim their portion of the fees. The hard part then is convincing merchants to invest the time and money needed to support these new payment systems. Hence the significant carrot of providing customer data to merchants.
In the EU, the banks wouldn’t make a significant saving by cutting out the card networks. So it not clear how they would fund the incentives needed to get merchants to support their new systems. All of those provides a barrier to bank payment apps (for C2B payments, C2C payments all happen through normal bank apps), before you even bring privacy into the equation, which just makes a bank payment system even less appealing to merchants.
Having said all of that, open banking in the EU is creating new opportunities for merchants and banks to skip card networks, especially for online payments. So it'll be interesting to see how that ecosystem evolves over time.
* People in Europe who use contactless all the time rarely have as many cards as some Americans.
* Americans who have that many cards rarely use contactless.
Perhaps I am an outlier for actually using all my cards contactless.
What if the iPhone 14 was SIM locked to a new Cellular MVNO run by Apple and if you wanted an iPhone you had to sign up for Apple Cellular? The iPhone 14 still used a Qualcomm baseband that supported LTE/5G but Apple locked it down to only their MVNO. An MVNO is a virtual network run on top of an existing network (e.g. AT&T, T-Mobile). How would you feel about that?
Apple NFC uses the same ISO 14443 protocol to talk to Payment Terminals that everyone else uses. Their payments run through the same card processor and merchant account networks as everyone else. There's no reason they couldn't expose the API to allow others to use the NFC capabilities of the iPhone to transact. They just choose not to because it allows them a monopoly.
Apple doesn't currently control their cellular baseband or NFC chips. Both chips interface to external systems running standardized protocols on infrastructure outside of Apple's control. Both can be used to access any compatible network.
With Apple restricting NFC to Apple Pay, they're basically slapping a surcharge on any competitor's banking product regardless of who it is.
You can spin this as Apple fighting back against Big Banks, but you're the one paying the Apple tax not the banks. It also pushes out small credit unions who can't or won't pay the Apple tax.
https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/connectivity/nfc/...
I think Wells Fargo actually did used to have their own Android Pay alternative within their own app, but they've discontinued it, and now you have to add their cards directly into Google Pay.
If you go into "Settings", "Apps & notifications", "Advanced": "Default apps", "Tap & pay", then you can select either "Google Pay" or another app that you may have. I think "Wells Fargo" app used to show up there back when they supported contactless within their app.
That said, I've seen exactly once someone using and Android phone to pay contactless. It was a huge pain, they tried multiple times.
Samsung Pay's Magnetic Stripe Emulation is much cooler, it's like magic. Unfortunately, magnetic stripes are a legacy tech.
Did you know that you can use Android NFC to read the full 16-digit card number of any contactless card, including the Apple Pay cards from an iOS device? The ones that are so secure you can't even see them within the interface of Apple Pay itself? And which have to be stored in a special storage on the device such that you're limited to only 8 or 12 cards, depending on the generation of the Apple Pay device?
I don't think you can even do that on an iPhone, since Apple Pay is apparently the only app that's allowed to use the NFC chip.
Pretty surprised so many people even in tech are OK with yet another entity knowing your purchase history.
I wish I could just make my phone emulate the contactless CC I have, that would be so mush simpler.
The country wide standard BankAxept, that has low fees (0.024USD per transaction), is used for almost all other card transactions, but Apple use their NFC monopoly to charge stores exorbiant VISA network fees when people use their Apple devices to pay. If the blockage of BankAxept on Apple Pay is allowed to continue it could cost the Norwegian economy hundreds of millions of dollars in just monopoly fees.
That "great source of income" contributes less than 1% of EU income.
Tl;dr: - Banks agreed to pay Apple 0.15% of transactions
- Payment networks allowed them to select which banks and which cards would be supported. The industry standard is, if you support one card you have to support all
- Somehow, the payment networks convinced Apple to agree not to compete with them by creating their own payment network in exchange for favorable terms
As far as access to the payment system itself, I also don't quite understand: if you have access to the NFC interface you can can presumably build your own payment system (e.g. google pay could in theory run on the iPhone -- is that what they mean?
(I"m not sure if this was the EU's complaint, but it's why I've always thought Apple Pay was anti-competitive.)
Developers do not get access to the low-level NFC interface but a set of APIs that allows to use NFC, but in a restricted way.
Apple does not seem to allow developers to use contact-less payment, making Apple Pay a monopoly on iOS, hence the antirtrust case.
There is still no technical ability for 3rd party payment apps to be able to be used from the lock screen like Apple Pay, and according to other comments Apple Pay has some special hardware access (to be able to work faster?).
Actually it's to store the payment credentials. Basically, you need a SE (secure element) that's physically tied to the NFC chip to handle payments if you want to be able to get banks to issue permanent keys you can use to sign. Some Android phones may support this (not sure), but Android Pay works a bit differently in that they're issued some small fixed number of single use tokens for payments that expire every 30 days and have to do a network attestation that they've kept the tokens secure to refresh them. Part of the attestation is a confirmation that the device isn't root kitted (this is done via complex fingerprinting that Google Play Services performs to try to detect running on a root kitted phone).
It wouldn't surprise me in this case that bank requirements aren't a part of how Apple structured this system as a lot of this was developed before the banks had their shit together (Apple had to use a third party to manage some crypto keys whereas newer iterations of the standard remove the trusted partner). That being said, it also wouldn't surprise me if Apple did this to retain a monopoly over the payment infrastructure in their ecosystem as that's extremely strategic for them in the long term (e.g. Apple Card). There are also UX reasons why it makes sense to do the way they did (at least initially) but maybe there are ways to design out of it to allow for 3p partners.
Apple is blurring all the lines and attempting to put everything under the Apple umbrella of products. If 50% of people use an iPhone, then by Apple's logic, 50% of all commerce and transactions can be taxed by Apple at every ingress and egress.
This isn't fair and Apple needs to be shut down in this effort.
Apple should have nothing to do with payments, and I hope the EU rips them a new one. We need to do the same back at home.
If an Apple application can access an API then this API should be accessible to competitors.
I am expecting some comment asking about security, the answer is Apple should have the money and talent to handle this(though with latest reveals security needs more attention). Applications can access your clipboard, your files, your photos , you tell the user that say "This Sudoku game wants access to your photos" and the user should answer but it would be even a better experience if the review process would actually work on those dudes won't just complain about links colors and other superficial shit.
Imagine your reaction if "Only Microsoft can create antivirus,firewall, browser,VM software for Windows because security and think about my mom)
But they started off with one option and that was it.
None of this is as simple as "everyone gets everything no matter the context or cost".
In my mind the fact that support for opening up iPhones and the like isn’t unilateral is something of an indictment of the larger state of the software world. When users are actively seeking a walled garden as a form of shelter, you know something with the surrounding world is messed up pretty badly. Yes Apple needs to do better, but so do the overwhelming majority of companies putting out any kind of software.
If every iPhone is going to be a gateway for terrible payment solutions we’re in it for a world of hurt (forget wallets, one app and one custom solution per store, or more, will be the norm).
I don't want a wallet. I just want to send money from my bank account, and this is already a solved problem which apple has no business getting their nose in.
ApplePay is opt-in btw, so it’s not like you’re forced to use it. It’s an extremely good user product, far exceeding anything else we’ve had available in my country.
Unfortunately for Apple that is not the case. With ideal, which again has been around for more than a decade, payments are instant and secure. Everyone has been using it for a decade. Works great! No need to pay apple 30%, and yet they demand it.
That's bit harsh don't you think?
It's a bit like Ford selling a v6 Mustang with 4 functional cylinders and a switch on the dashboard that enables the other two but you're not allowed to flip the switch unless you send Ford $$$.
Nintendo could have easily prevented copying tags by writing a signature based on the tag's MAC to the data on the tag itself. The Switch would just read the tag, generate a signature and compare it to the data read.
An NFC code isn't a creative work that can be copyrighted, and it's a stretch to call an NFC tag a DRM system. IANAL, but I suspect that Nintendo would have a hard time arguing in a court that aftermarket Amiibo cards are doing anything illegal at all (of course, provided those cards don't violate trademark or have copyrighted graphics/characters printed on them).
That's a dangerous game around these parts.
> I have no problem with people downloading a few hundreds bytes of data to unlock parts of software they already paid for.
I agree, the locked content is taking up storage space on their device and for many it's permanently inaccessible due to the scarcity of the cards.
Subtlety is lost in text, and wasted on the technically-minded.
> the locked content is taking up storage space
Modders noticed unknown amiibo codes in the Wii U version of Breath of the Wild version and were able to create tags months before the amiibos were actually released. So in this case the locked content is released earlier than designed.
This strikes me differently from the App Store issues. There Apple is dealing with 3rd parties and trying to create a playing field where they allow competitors on their platform, i.e. Apple Music and Spotify. Here Apple built their NFC chip for their own use and for their own product. If another company wants to provide NFC capability for credit cards, they can and the actual credit cards already do.
The other companies wants to provide NFC capabilities for their mobile bank/direct payment app. Like Norwegian “Vipps”, direct instant payments between any Norwegian bank.
Could be wrong though, as I haven't followed it closely, being an Android user.
> If you build it, they will take it away from you. That's the European market for you and compounding legal issues like this make it a difficult one to foster innovation in.
Now that a really stupid statement, what does it even mean? Europe is a bad guy that goes from house to house to steal kids drawing? Europe bashing every time there's a form of regulation is really exhausting. So Europe should be a lawless place?