Once you rustle the feathers of traditional power centers (finance and law), expect them to hit back to keep the power hierarchy in place.
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.
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.
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.