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Comment by concinds | Hacker News Reader

I'm split on this.

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.

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> 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.

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.

You can recharge Navigo but not load it onto your phone like with Apple Pay cards. That's only possible on Samsungs, not other Androids or iPhones, and even though according to one commenter this may not be the case much longer, I hate to see things that slow technical progress and QoL improvements down.

I looked more into it - you are correct, Navigo sounds like it still won't replace a physical card.

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.

Apple doesn't block third-party NFC / Apple Wallet use. They have opened it for certain use cases, including transit passes in many cities: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207958

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-...

Then maybe switch your bank to a sane one ? Effectively voting with your wallet.

Not sure what it's like in the US (or the EU), but in Canada, all banks effectively offer the same level of customer-hostile service.

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.

If their app they have control over your data, so it's easier to track, fingerprint you and milk it a bit more.

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