Apple unveils contactless payments via Tap to Pay on iPhone | Hacker News Reader

Apple unveils contactless payments via Tap to Pay on iPhone

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Clarification due to a somewhat confusing title:

This is about the merchant using an iPhone to accept credit cards and other Tap to Pay devices.

The customer was able to pay with Tap to Pay with their iPhone for a while now.

The long slow road to contactless payments. Almost 2 decades along in the technology adoption curve.

I was ready for this in 2005.

https://money.howstuffworks.com/personal-finance/debt-manage...

If course as the article points out, it wasn’t even new technology back then:

“ Not Exactly New Tech Mobile introduced the Speedpass in 1997. Speedpass is a small device on a keychain (called a fob) that users wave in front of the Speedpass logo on gas pumps. The cost of the gas is automatically deducted from the user's Speedpass account”

That’s not at all comparable since you’re not really paying. By that logic we’ve had contactless payments for hundreds of years in the form of opening a tab at a merchant.

That's sounds like stored value or contactless debit. What do you mean "not really paying"?

It's more like a contactless gift card: since you can't use your change for purchasing something different, the payment is in the purchase of the gift card.

It's still got the "contactless" part, though.

I can see their point. If you already paid in advance, you aren’t really paying again when it subtracts the value from your account.

You're not actually initiating a transfer of money. Sure, it feels like that but in reality they're just storing your CC info and debiting you either in advance (like gas) or settling up (like hotels). You have to have a prior relationship with the company handling your account and figure out a secondary out-of-band payment flow. The fob doesn't really add anything except as a holder of your account id.

The only thing they have in common is the physical action of "boop boop" at a terminal or scanner.

And even when I pay cash, I just throw it at them and run, so no contact there either.

EU has contactless paying for a while now, but it uses a chip embedded in the bank card.

The US has contactless payment with a chip on the card too, but this is different.

How? I was under the impression this tech was the same. Just like our cards’ chips are compatible.

It is different in way that same technology now let you use your phone to accept payment via tap. Not just to pay.

I studied abroad in France in 2012--at this time, all European card readers had been chip-based for quite a while and my US credit card didn't have one. I couldn't figure out how to use them and many store clerks had no idea what to do with my magnetic-strip credit card.

I went to England in 2019, at which point cards in the US had been updated to use magnetic stripes, and everyone was using tap-to-pay. It turns out my credit card had tap-to-pay support as well but it wasn't widely used in the US (or at least in my sphere). Now it finally seems common-enough here.

I'm planning another trip to Europe in the next year... Really eager to see what payments look like nowadays.

Can't speak for other countries, but at least here in the Netherlands, chip based cards are still the main type of card, though most of these cards support contactless payment as well. Almost all PoSes also support Apple/Google pay too which is actually pretty convenient. However, I think many (supermarket) PoSes also support magnetic - they appear to have 2 card slots on them.

Can't speak for the Netherlands, but contactless payments seem to dominate in many European countries: https://www.nets.eu/Media-and-press/news/Pages/The-DACH-regi...

We in The Netherlands are one of the most cashless societies in Europe. We mostly pay with our mobiles or contactless with banking cards. We even are "going Dutch" sharing our bills with what we call a Tikkie: One person pays the bill and then we send over instant messaging our payment request for money which can be payed directly with one click and authentication in banking app.

One thing that is annoying for foreigners with credit cards is that they are barely accepted here. We work mostly with Maestro and almost all Dutch e-commerce sites work with Ideal which directly link to the banking apps of the local banks.

My wallet does not contain any cash anymore and just an ID and OV card.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dutch-payment-landscape-one-m...

Can’t speak for other countries, but in France and Northern Italy this is the same: contactless cards everywhere. I live in France and --I have to check my banking app to check this because I don’t remember-- the last time I went to a cash machine was almost one year ago.

Same for Poland, and what I've heard, Sweden.

Ditto for Finland. Contactless cards or mobile phone payments work everywhere.

I haven't touched cash ever since covid hit, and very rarely before it.

I'm in the US and the only time I can remember going to an ATM in the past 5 years is because farmers markets sometimes give you discounts > credit card rewards for cash and weed shops cannot use banks so you have to pay cash.

IMO farmers markets would disappear if they stopped using cash. It's basically synonym for tax avoidance sprinkled with some fraudulent claims how your honey cures everything.

I totally agree farmers markets are all about tax avoidance. They would charge me the flat dollar amount for cash but then add in the tax when I used a card. No way they are paying taxes on that cash transaction.

For Americans visiting the Netherlands one word of caution: many of the pay terminals (especially the parking ones) do not seem to like U.S. cards, and even some the vendors from Europe. When we were on vacation there a few years ago it was a roulette game to figure out if parking meters would take my card or that of my father in law (from Hungary).

The problem is that they have a local exchange there, and do not have cross agreements with all of the payment vendors (not at the Visa level, but bellow that). It was annoying, and caused us a lot of hassle. I am not sure how we could have avoided it.

Most shops in the Netherlands work with maestro of mastercard and vpay of Visa. It is directly linked to our bank credit and has low transaction fees. Maestro and vpay is accepted all over the world. We work directly with IBAN numbers and not with credit card types like mostly in the world.

Normal Mastercard/visa credit don’t work here since shops have to pay way higher transaction fees while almost nobody uses them.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maestro_(debit_card) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_PayPlease

It will be phased out though in 2023 to Mastercard debit and visa debit so likely in the future Netherlands payment system will be more aligned with what other countries use.

> It will be phased out though in 2023 to Mastercard debit and visa debit

That sounds like an absolutely terrible idea. Why would we give these two rotten-to-the-core companies such power over our payment systems?

It sounds it will work the same as maestro but be usable in places where you need credit card numbers. https://www.mastercard.com/news/europe/en/perspectives/en/20...

I don't really understand your point, neither do I understand the change:

Maestro and V-PAY already _are_ owned by those two companies, and are debit cards. What changes with Mastercard/Visa debit?

That it erodes the position of EU banks in favor of Visa and Mastercard. I have no problem with them facilitating the tech, but I do have a problem with them usurping the position of the banks. The EU is already too dependent on the United States in this manner, no need to make it worse.

For Canadians - they've got no issue with almost all of our cards. It's just the American ones that run into issues, so your chip & pin and tap features will work splendidly abroad.

Now you know why so many dutch ride bikes!

:-)

Hopefully we can get rid of our OV cards soon. Annoys me a lot that I have to take it out of my wallet every time.

worth mentioning that this seems a problem limited to the US. Even in Canada, the smallest of towns will have contactless payment. Many Canadians don't really use cash because interac/credit cards have all supported tap to pay for over a decade now.

To be clear, the US has contactless payments all over and probably has had them since ~2015, it just took some time for people to "discover" them.

People will still be talking about how the US doesn't have contactless payments another five years from now. It's an inexpensive way to feel good.

> People will still be talking about how the US doesn't have contactless payments another five years from now. It's an inexpensive way to feel good.

From my personal experience, there were roughly about 80% of shops in NYC, up until the beginning of pandemic, that did not accept contactless or where it did not work. One particular supermarket next door had the proper POS for 3 years and it still wouldn't work even this May when I left.

The restaurants were even worse.

my point is that contactless and chip-cards have been around for so long outside the US that magnetic stripes are the oddity. Even the smallest of places with electronic payments will support either chip cards or contactless tap or often both. Near the US border in Canada, many shops have machines that read magnetic stripes. These machines cater almost exclusively to American travellers.

I've only just gotten used to the slide-it-in-the-slot kind. Whatever that's called. The thing that's replacing the magnetic stripes, more or less.

I always forget about contactless. I think all my cards can do it? Not knowing for sure is why I never try, and just stick the card in the slot, which always works.

I think I've paid with my phone one time ever. For some reason I can't bring myself to trust it to work 100% of the time so I can leave my cards at home, at which point I may as well just use a card since I have 'em anyway. I guess I could start carrying phone + cash as a backup and skip the cards, but that's even less convenient. I do activate the payment screen (iPhone) all the time by accident, though I couldn't tell you how.

(I'm not even that old...)

You should see the 'contactless' symbol (looks like a sideways wifi logo) if your card supports it.

I generally pay with the apple watch if the store supports it (most seem to, nowadays). It is more convenient than reaching for the wallet since the thing is in my wrist anyway.

> I've only just gotten used to the slide-it-in-the-slot kind.

I always called this "chip". My UK friends called it "chip-and-pin" in 2012. But yeah, no idea what the technical or widely-accepted colloquial terms are.

> Not knowing for sure is why I never try, and just stick the card in the slot

Yeah, for some reason the UX for contactless is terrible. Sometimes something will show four evenly-spaced green lights (and sometimes they're blue--in any case, why does that mean "contactless"?) but often those lights don't appear until you attempt a tap-to-pay and then they might be delayed by several seconds. And even then, occasionally the hardware malfunctions and can't actually handle tap-to-pay. These hardware failures seemed to be way more common in the early days, but now almost everything does support tap-to-pay--you just often can't tell until you try which is just the dumbest thing ever.

> I think I've paid with my phone one time ever. For some reason I can't bring myself to trust it to work 100% of the time so I can leave my cards at home

I definitely do it as a last resort, but I've done it a few times (e.g., if I forget my wallet). Mostly on iOS I'm often trying to pay quickly and I try to activate the contactless payment but I'll end up turning my phone off or I'll try to bring up my card before my phone is close enough. The uncertainty always makes me feel way more anxious than it should and it's just less stress to use a card (cards also don't run out of batteries).

> Mostly on iOS I'm often trying to pay quickly and I try to activate the contactless payment but I'll end up turning my phone off or I'll try to bring up my card before my phone is close enough.

Having an Apple watch helps out a lot here. I can't do it on my phone either, but on my watch it is trivial.

Good to know. I've had my eye on one for a while, but I opted for Air Pods last Christmas. :) Maybe this year...

The easier flow is to bring up the card while you’re next in line, then tap it to the reader when it’s time to pay.

You can often scan your phone/card much sooner than when you're presented with your total. I tap my watch at the grocery store as soon as I'm finished loading up the belt.

Whenever "your transaction" begins at the register could be when you're eligible to present your payment to the terminal.

A lot of POS's support contactless payments, but they were kind of flaky for the first two years, and...oddly slow.

Fred Meyers here in WA still doesn't support contactless payments (QFC, owned by the same company, does, however), annoying since I still have to shop there often.

> Fred Meyers here in WA still doesn't support contactless payments (QFC, owned by the same company, does, however)

Some Freddy's do, at least intermittently. A few weeks ago, the one in Lake City had it enabled on their pads at the self checkout and I successfully used tap. But when I went back a week after that, tap was turned back off.

Kroger uses their smaller brands as testbeds for stuff and since QFC is somewhere in the bottom five for size-of-Kroger-operated-brands, I guess it makes sense.

In the Seattle area, Fred Myer is the only place I can’t use NFC payments, for the last 3 or 4 years. Target has them, though sometimes their COVID plastic on the terminals interferes with it.

It’s annoying I have to carry a credit card, driver license (WA doesn’t support digital licenses yet), and an Orca card (also, annoyingly not phone compatible yet) in the wallet MagSafe attachment for my phone.

> A lot of POS's support contactless payments, but they were kind of flaky for the first two years

Yeah, that was my experience as well.

> Fred Meyers here in WA still doesn't support contactless payments (QFC, owned by the same company, does, however), annoying since I still have to shop there often.

I've largely had good experiences all over the midwest, but there are a few Stripe card readers that advertise "contactless" but don't actually work (probably misconfigured?). I've been traveling around AZ recently, and I've found a few POS terminals that don't support contactless at all, strangely. But overall they seem pretty widely available.

And yet, I've had contactless rejected (even, we want a signature) as recently as 2018, at least. In major metro in California - let alone gas-station-in-rural-Georgia type places.

The tech was mostly there a while ago, but hardly universally supported. This is one tech area where the US has definitely been notably behind the curve.

In Turkey you can move around almost cashless now. Taxis started to accept cards in droves due to the pandemic and some municipalities are integrating VISA/Master infra to the mass transport, so you can just travel with your card.

Besides that, literally everywhere allows contactless payments. Even Visa/Master is changing their card designs to move vital information to the back of the card to prevent information theft via hidden cameras or a very keen eye.

Same in the US. I virtually never use cash. The only real problem I run into is the occasional "open bar"--drinks are free but there's still an etiquette that you should leave a tip which generally means cash.

> drinks are free but there's still an etiquette that you should leave a tip which generally means cash.

In my experience on such rare few occasions I was able to tip with Venmo.

Is there a "tip with venmo" poster displayed or do you have to ask the bartender their venmo account name? I've never seen this before, but agreed that it's rare.

A potentially malicious third-party selling your financial transaction history is not the best choice... by far.

I wasn't arguing in favor of Venmo, but are VISA and MasterCard really better options in this regard?

They are required for the CC transaction, this adds an additional player that should not be necessary. In civilized countries they have direct bank to bank transfers.

"Civilized" countries?

Like the euro countries with IBANs?

NZ and similar has had bank to bank payments for ...decades?

Fee-less and effectively instant? That's the state we are at, now, though it doesn't work for all banks due to the separate clearing system for instant transfers. Normal transfers just take a bank day delay if you're unlucky.

Yes, though I actually prefer non-instant... at least once I fixed my bill-pay amount before it cleared at 10pm that evening.

Oh sure, that instant effect is more important for transactions where you don't feel like waiting for it clearing before getting the "reward". Say, being able to buy at an online shop before noon to get it shipped the same day, without any credit history or such required.

That don't require tipping?

> In civilized countries they have direct bank to bank transfers

I'm sure whatever country you're from (or otherwise alluding to) is a fine place, no need for the transparent insecurity. :) Narrowly, I agree that secure (and fee-less) bank-to-bank transfers would be preferable to CC.

> They are required for the CC transaction, this adds an additional player that should not be necessary.

We're positing a situation where CC's aren't available, so it's not an additional player but rather a different player.

>> CC's aren't available

A misstatement by me, still they are extra to what should be a bank to bank matter.

No argument from me here. I would like to see better financial infrastructure. Specifically the idea that VISA is permitted to collect a 4% sales tax on virtually everything is a real bummer.

Come to think of it, perhaps I was thinking that since most folks would rather have/trust a credit card, an additional path is just that, somewhat redundant.

I'd just say "sorry I run out of cash, can I Venmo/Zelle you?"

The EU terminals have support for tips separated from the primary amount.

If I understand you correctly, we have those here in the States as well, but the problem is you're not using your CC in the first place (in the "open bar" scenario) so you never actually use the terminals.

If only our banks also supported Apple Pay...

That's probably a BDDK (regulatory body for banks) issue.

Good thing is you can actually use Apple Pay, I use my Watch to pay for stuff all the time.

You have to have a foreign bank account that supports it, I use Wise since it allows Turkish customers.

Any issues about taxing etc if I get directly paid to Wise? I'd love to be able to use Apple Pay in Turkey.

I've lived in France since September, and I think I've used cash... once? You can live entirely off using your phone/credit card to pay these days (if you don't frequent "cash-only" shops).

..just dont go to Germany. We are not very advanced in that regard.

Of course huge amounts of stores offer contactless paying, but generally Cash is still dominant around here. Change is slow, and currently, Cash is still king, especially with small or street merchants.

Since I'm dreading the coming of a cashless society, I'm really rooting for the German to push back against it as long as they can so that I can keep using notes and coins in euros.

I always found that so weird! The Exportweltmeister, producing some of the most advanced equipment... and in many places you can't pay with a card at all. Why do you think it is?

Machinery needs to be lubricated to run well.

For many small businesses non-tax registered money is the lub which makes them run well.

Jokes aside the price of getting a card terminal where for many businesses completely unattractive for a long time and often still are if put in context to the number of people which will use it.

I know one local takeaway which stopped accepting card payment after their terminal broke recently, as it wasn't worth it to buy a new one. Instead they now allow sending money by PayPal, but non-advertised and mainly for a single specific big recurring customer and sometimes if someone doesn't has cash with them.

We Germans seem to love our cold hard cash, so the incentive to get a card reader is lower. There are even automatic coin counting machines in some self-checkout desks...

To clarify, you can rely on nearly any supermarket or drug store to accept credit cards / contactless these days. Daily shopping is no problem.

Smaller stores or restaurants, forget it. Bring cash.

In restaurants it just so happens that not all of the people are on the books and neither is all of the income.

It has gotten much better in the pandemic. I pay at the bakery etc with cards. Not sure when I last paid enything with cash. Only caveat is that "cards" not always means Visa/MC/AmEx, but can mean Girocard only. If that is the case (and I'd just ask) then you as a non German will have to pay cash.

That is a feature, not a bug.

I tend to not carry a card anymore, just my phone (Romania). I don't remember the last time I went to a shop that didn't accept card. Everyone who accepts cards accepts contactless.

It’s tap to pay almost everywhere in the Netherlands. Apple Pay works like charm.

For france: contactless on phone should be ok with widely used card providers (VISA)

Beware, since covid, use of cash has dramatically fallen, last month a restaurant struggled to give me 2€ change, they didn't have 2€ in cash ! Paying in cash with the right amount should never be a problem though.

That may have been a signal that you should tip more.

France is not America, thank you very much. I have never seen people leave tips here.

The reverse problem is also true. As a Brit traveling in the US I was dumbfounded when a payment terminal asked for my zip code...of course i didn't have one and my card was rejected.

Haven’t used cash since the pandemic started in the UK. Covid encouraged even market traders and street food vendors to move to contactless payments - which were just about the final holdouts.

NZ'er here - haven't used cash for years, except when you sell something online or buy drugs.

Spend is kinda hilarious - in supermarket checkout "can I pay $150 in cash and remaining using card?" just so you don't have to deal with coins.

Same, but it's largely been that way since the early 90s.

It's weird getting pitches from US FinTechs that are solving problems that literally only exist because of how painfully backward that US financial infrastructure is.

Also a kiwi (although living in UK) I've used contactless since it was first available in NZ (ages ago) but when I returned late 2019 I found that contactless was no longer accepted at certain places, like liquor stores. Too many munters nicking cards to buy booze with I guess.

I can't wait to live in a 100% cashless society but I do think that the process should be refined (especially for phone payments).

Atm I tap and often have no idea if I'm really paying exactly what I should be. Credit card/debit numbers should only ever be temporary and for a given amount to a given merchant (like how my bank requires generating an OTP when adding a new payee). Confirmation that we are paying x merchant £y is definitely required.

Current system is really weak in that if someone has my credit/debit number they can arbitrarily charge me, in the UK if someone has my sort code + bank they can use that at a business to create a debit request and I get arbitrarily charged.

Yep, and I haven’t ‘dipped’ a card for years now to pay. With the high value payments going up for contactless, I might forget my pin code altogether.

At least in the UK, the increase in the contactless limit is accompanied by an increase in the frequency at which you're asked to confirm your card using chip+pin.

However, most merchants now have terminals that accept contactless mobile payments without a limit -- Tesco were one of the last to upgrade. So if you pay with your phone then you're back at risk of forgetting your pin.

I'd quite like it if there were some mechanism for setting device spend limits, as my smartwatch will do payments but with only a pattern for security it doesn't matter that I'd be happy only using it for sub-£5 payments: it'll quite happily authorise much more.

While on our first pandemic vacation about three months back I had to acquire local currency and briefly froze in front of the ATM as it'd been over a year and a half since I'd entered that PIN anywhere. I had to mentally cycle through a few I've used over the years until I remembered the current one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softcard

I used this payment processor in utah in the early 2010s at Jamba Juices and a few other random places. It was pretty sweet but its name was Isis and that was right around the time Isis started becoming big and I believe they ended up dying off.

Typically, when I see a company changing names, I tend to think they've fucked up something so badly in the past that they hope a name change will remove that stinnk. When you see a name change like this, you're like "yup, good move. hope you did it fast enough!"

Avoiding the Isis name was even enough to change the story line for the animated show Archer.

Technically Speedpass was RFID, Apple Pay and most modern tap-to-pay tech uses NFC

Had speedpass back when it first came out, great technology for the time

I remember doing a POC using a Samsung device for NFC ticketing for BART back in 2004.

Something I was thinking about the other day is how some modern credit cards technically have four different ways to pay. Swiping pressure-sensitive paper over the raised numbers (the original method) is still possible, though I haven't seen a merchant actually do this since maybe the mid-2000's. Then you have magstripe, chip, and RFID all in the same card.

Pretty impressive backwards compatibility, although I think the original copy-to-paper mechanism is finally being phased out, since some new credit cards no longer have raised digits. (My new Visa from Chase has the digits on the back, and they're only slightly embossed and not in the same place. Probably wouldn't work with the old swipers.)

I wonder how long until magstripe is phased out?

And the numbers themselves that can be entered manually.

5 payment modalities with a thin piece of plastic.

And what really make this a 5th modality is the required CVV (card verification value) printed on the backside of the card.

From what I know is CVV isn't required if the card is presented in person. The card processor will revoke your agreement if you verify the card is present and it's actually not however.

Which is why I have a habit of removing the cvv from the card(scratching the numbers off) and just remember those 3 digits like an extra pin. This practice is becoming obsolete with MFA solutions like 3Dsecure

I'm not sure if this is still the case. But some years ago when paying with a mag stripe card in two South American countries seemed to type the CVV code on the POS terminal. This was different from other countries where they type the last four digits of the card number.

I had my card taken that way five-ish years ago. It was on a ferry where presumably there wasn't enough service to use a digital reader. Or maybe the system was just down. I never knew that was an option until then!

Me neither, my first encounter with it was 3 or 4 years ago at a backpacking shelter in Iceland.

One of the hotels I used to stay at did this too, they had a modern card terminal when you checked out, but they took impressions of cards during check-in. It doesn't really do much of anything in the modern era, but you felt like it was doing something and that's enough. Card payments have two separate uncorrelated steps. Authorisation and Settlement.

In the Authorisation step, the merchant on behalf of the network can decide whether you, the supposed card holder, are authorised to make this payment. For example if you have Chip-and-PIN this is the step where a PIN failure means they won't give you the bottle of whiskey you just pointed at through the glass.

To be effective Authorisation must happen up front. With Chip cards, (and also contactless payment) this can happen even offline, because the Chip can carry policy decisions like "Offline payment of up to $10 each time, $100 total before I talk to the network is OK, after that No more until I see a network" inside it.

Impression machines were the very most rudimentary type of "Authorisation", the impression recorded is some evidence they actually saw your card. Or a card embossed with the same numbers, at some point. Modern networks don't want the useless paper trail which results, but some impression machines are still out there and hey, it felt like a "real" card payment. The fact they're essentially useless doesn't matter because...

The Settlement step is separate, and often happens hours, or even days later. In this step the Merchant says, hey Payment Network, I'm Some Big Merchant and I want $123 from your customer #9876.

You might think, aha, and now they provide details from that authorisation right? Right? Nope. It's totally unauthenticated, subject to all manner of glitches and mistakes, and it is based entirely on trust. The big merchants are rich, so, if they sometimes lie and steal that's OK. Whereas if you, Mr Wage Earner, don't pay for that can of Pepsi, you're a criminal and you're going to jail.

If some merchant in say, Spain decides you just spend €546 on a TV with your card, even though you've never visited Europe, that just works. Left to itself, €546 plus conversion costs goes on your card account. To reverse that you'd have to notice the €546 charge, call your bank and complain about this clearly fraudulent card transaction. They're not always going to magically detect it, they should have some anti-fraud pattern matching e.g. if that store suddenly claims everybody living in your town in Ohio bought a TV from them, that's suspicious, it probably doesn't go through, and hey if you never visited Europe maybe that's enough to block it, but not necessarily. The responsibility sadly always stays with you to report any bogus transactions that get through even though the Card Networks made barely any effort to prevent fraud. So, read your card statements.

I was on a train a few years back and the snack cart had to go cash-only when we were in cellular dead zones. I guess it depends on the operator's risk tolerance - you can't tell if a card is declined until the customer is long gone, but if the dead zones are big enough you'll get fewer sales because so many people don't carry cash anymore.

A lot of credit cards (Apple...) no longer have raised numbers, or a number on the front at all.

Or even, in Apple's case, a consistent "card" attached number at all.

Is that right? My understanding is the physical AppleCard has a fixed number that is simply not printed and relies on rotating CVV via the standard chip reading like most standard chip cards. The device-based ApplePay can rotate its number but that too only rotates CVV by default.

My point was only that the card-chip associated number, the ApplePay associated number, and the number the user hands out to web sites, are not correlated. The user could choose to change their CC number every day when they wake up if they want, and the physical card does not change in any way as a result. Nor does it need to, since you cannot use it outside of the card.

Only one of my cards actually has raised numbers and its about to expire, so will probably get a completely flat one that replaces it as well. 2 of my cards are tap only, the mag stripe is gone - they are also store-specific cards, so that might have something to do with it.

Master card said they will start phasing out mag strip in 2024.

Soon enough tap/dip will be the only way.

Yeah, here in Canada the magstrip has all but gone the way of the dodo - it's chip-and-pin or tap everywhere here. IIRC vendors here stopped taking magstrips before the Americans even.

Cards still have magstrips on them but I can't remember the last time one got used. Maybe a gas station.

Same in Aus. I think banking innovation like this is way easier in smaller countries like australia because there’s way fewer banks. The USA has hundreds of banks - so getting them to all agree on a standard is near impossible. It’s no wonder America still uses ACH and cheques.

Australia has just 6 banks. And they have a history of collaborating on things like this - since a fluid economy raises all boats, and fraud hurts them all. All Australian cards and point of sale systems support chips and taps. And have for nearly a decade.

There's a similar situation in Switzerland, where a handful of banks dominate the national market despite some smaller (cantonal) options that mostly have their own consortium anyway. The larger banks cooperated on creating a mobile payments platform known as TWINT [1], which allows for fast and free individual payments for splitting the cost of a meal, private sales, or even many in-store transactions. This allows them a competitive advantage over alternatives such as small Swiss banks or foreign banks that the many non-Swiss residents in Switzerland may otherwise continue using. These other options are relegated to IBAN transfers which are notably less convenient.

[1] https://www.twint.ch/en/

I think the problem is less the country size and more that the USA had a legislative structure that encouraged small, local banks until recently (1980 iirc) and so before then there was a Cambrian explosion of banks (pardon the pun). Now banks are gradually consolidating, but they have nothing close to the oligopoly that you see in countries without that sort of history.

The big holdout in the USA was fuel pumps. For some reason they demanded and got all kinds of extra time to convert to chip cards instead of swipe.

> The big holdout in the USA was fuel pumps.

Was? Most of the ones I use are still magstripe-based ("remove your card quickly"). Only occasionally it says "leave card inserted" which is where (I assume) it's talking to the chip.

> Cards still have magstrips on them but I can't remember the last time one got used.

But the chips are relatively flaky and often don't work. At least here (California) after three failed chip communication attempts, the terminal allows a magstripe swipe instead as a backup. Happens quite often.

On at least one of my cards magstripe is officially considered a legacy feature, I have to explicitly request that it's enabled if I'm travelling to a place likely to make use of magstripe payments, and it will only remain enabled for one or two weeks.

Just don't assume that's to do you any favors - credit card fraud is 100% on them, the removal of features is to minimize fraud and if it's a feature you still occasionally need it's being done at your expense.

Sure it’s 100% on the credit card company, but it’s still very inconvenient for the cardholder.

I had no idea if the magnetic stripe on my (australian) credit card worked until a recent trip to the USA. I’ve had that card for years and I don’t think I’ve ever swiped it before. Australian POS terminals won’t let you use the magnetic strip on a card when chip & pin is available. Even inserting your card seems old fashioned now - PayPass (contactless payment) is by far the most common way to pay in australia.

Each year there seems to be fewer reasons to carry a wallet around. Cash? Killed by covid. Card? Apple Pay. Drivers licence? There’s an app for that. It won’t be long before wallets are entirely useless.

I'm far more likely to have my wallet on me than my phone. Credit cards have infinite battery life, 100% waterproofing, no real-time tracking/spying and low to no cost to lose. Cash trades out the low cost to lose for anonymity.

> no real-time tracking/spying

You'll want a Faraday cage for any contactless cards.

Yes. They sell wallets with Faraday cages. I have been so far able to push off contactless cards, so I just assumed that other people who care about avoiding realtime tracking also insist on chip only.

I think you are in the minority here.

> original copy-to-paper mechanism

And when the pressure-stamp machine broke, the merchant would use a pen, and write the card number by hand. No problem.

Or just drag the length of the pen over the paper while card is underneath. Repeat a couple of times to get a good imprint while making sure to keep paper/card alignment

I've had this happen in 2018/2019 in a Central American country.

I had a merchant use the numbers on paper method in 2017.

I rented a bicycle in Florida a few days ago where the merchant took an imprint of my card (yeah, in February 2022). I'm not even sure how that can possibly be cheaper than one of those Square devices at this point.

> Swiping pressure-sensitive paper over the raised numbers (the original method) is still possible

I've seen this still happen occasionally in taxis - or rather I saw it happen within the past decade. When I last lived in the states I'd bump into it especially with rural taxis - I assume it's dying quickly though because it's incredibly inconvenient when compared to paying via an app or tapping.

The lack of raised digits is actually a serious issue for legibility, I've had the digits fully rub off on some flat-printed cards - this may have been a low quality printing issue but either way I wouldn't applaud it being adopted since the raised numbers make it easier to read by eye.

Cards are slowly moving towards not having printed numbers at all, and having the numbers only available via the issuer's app or website. This allows for rotating numbers.

Rotating numbers are still extremely viable with fixed card numbers - it's possible to issue a set of semi-permenant printed numbers and also offer a tool that can issue additional digits for untrustworthy retailers or strange one-off payments. The removal of digits from the card itself is a cost being levied on the customer and it provides no real benefit.

Removal of digits reduces reissuances which are annoying for both issuer and customer.

Cards are moving towards no card at all i.e. virtual cards. USA is very slow in adopting new payment technology compared to the rest of the world. I live in South Africa and tap to pay is so much of a thing that you do not have to worry if you leave your card at home as you can tap at like 80% of the merchants, and if you can't they will have a fall back like QR code etc, NFC enabled cards have been around for years and all the merchants are really quick in adopting them.

Care to share some examples? I’ve never seen this in the US

Apple card is the only one I'm aware of

The Apple credit card only shows the number if you reveal it in Apple Wallet app. Their card, technically run by Goldman Sachs, is all white with no numbers. Not sire how to verify but I've heard if you use it with Apple Pay I think it doesn't use that number, but a rotating one.

It can use a rotating number, I think, but when I tap my watch, any receipt with shows me the last four digits still shows me the same last four digits. Apple rotates the CVV, but not the card number so much.

I thought the whole point of the rotation was to make it hard to track credit card purchases across stores etc. Just rotating the CVV is a nice security feature but definitely not that.

Are you doing it with the Apple Card or just Apple Pay?

Good point! Almost always Apple Pay, not often the physical card.

In the UK my current debit card for my good bank is a flat black rectangle with the Mastercard Logo (overlapping circles) the name of the bank, the chip connector, and an arrow (for those with reasonable vision to determine correct orientation if they've never seen a chip before). From a Tactile point of view it has an indentation (orientation again) and a single Braille-like bump signifying "This is your debit card" (other cards may have more bumps).

On the back though it has a lot of details about the account, who I am, validity and so on, so all the same data is on the card, just not on the front and not embossed.

Current era bank cards aren't bright enough to change their numbers though, many of them are scarcely "smarter" than they were when they were completely passive, just barely enough going on to make it trickier to counterfeit them, not really any attempt to actually make that truly impossible for the majority of banks and customers. From the bank's point of view if they spend $5 per card to avoid $3 per card of fraud, they wasted $2 per card, and if half that fraud lands on the customer (because Mrs Smith didn't notice or the bank successfully prevented her claiming her money back and blamed her for the loss instead) they wasted $3.50.

In the US, I have multiple Chase credit cards with no raised numbers. The number is printed in flat ink on the back of the card.

The Apple card doesn't display the number anywhere on the card at all.

In Italy, debit cards have numbers that are not embossed (however they are slightly "engraved" i.e. the number forms a slight depression on the card - basically the opposite of embossing). IIRC I've seen the same in other EU countries. I now live in Australia and in my experience, here all cards are embossed, no matter if they are credit or debit cards.

Most new cards that I have seen in Australia doesn't have embossing, they have flat surface. The number is simply printed on the back. Many banks allow you to lock the card using the App as well.

I've had a lot of taxi drivers tell me they couldn't take credit cards at all. That is, until I tell them "I have no other way to pay, so I guess... later dude". Suddenly it's, "oh, oh, oh, the card reader is working again, look at that!"

Whenever I get into an airport taxi I always mention "Oh you take credit card right?" due to the queue system at airports they either reply yes and, if they actually don't, I get out guilt free at the other end - or they reply no and I move to the next taxi down the line. A significant number of airport taxis do shady stuff to try and extract extra or under the table payment.

(Edit, just to clarify - I get out of the Taxi on the other end guilt free because the driver lied to me about payment options. I don't like skipping out on service payments - I think people should be paid fairly for the work they're doing (even if I could get away with not paying)... but if you're lying to me you're doing me a disservice)

I've filled up gas once for the driver in Malaysia.

And people wonder why Uber killed the whole taxi industry overnight.

Well, in all fairness, Uber mostly killed the whole taxi industry by being really really illegal and not following any of the rules - including those meant for regulatory capture and those for safety. About 3000 women are sexually assaulted by Uber drivers every year - I'm not saying that doesn't happen with taxis too, just be careful about painting a too-rosy picture.

No one painted a too-rosy picture. They just pointed out that Uber killed Taxis because Taxis ran on horrible service plus a government mandated monopoly. Take away the latter like Uber did, and there’s no need to put up with the former.

Taxi in a lot of places, and I’ve been to many countries, don’t follow the rules either. Turn off meter, take long route, all the shady stuff, pretend to not understand foreigners

I'm not sure how it was in the early days of Uber, but these days Uber does background checks on drivers, and IIRC they have for quite some time. Is there really any reason to believe that cab companies would do a better job of weeding out horrible people than Uber? I can't imagine they do much more than a background check.

There is legal oversight and reporting required from conventional cab companies. And yes this was very much from the early days of Uber - when people cheered on the fact that they identified regulators and refused to book rides for them so they couldn't formally record violations.

Oh holy christ, I hadn't heard of them doing that. Doesn't shock me, sadly.

Oh, a source[1] - this is why I'm extremely skeptical of the goodness of disrupting. Building a new competitor that can straight up out compete existing monopolies is one thing but beating existing companies by refusing to play by the same rules removes the power of law from society.

It was super depressing at the time to hear the Libertarian crowd come out in staunch defense of this program.

1. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/uber-uses-secret-pr...

Building a new competitor that can straight up out compete existing monopolies is one thing but beating existing companies by refusing to play by the same rules removes the power of law from society.

Look up the definition of "regulatory capture," and you'll see a photo of a taxicab, or at least you should. When the law does not respect the people, the people will not respect the law... nor should they.

They run the background checks, but they might not take any action on the result of them. A friend of a friend is a registered sex offender who drives for them. They stalled him for about 6 months, but ended up allowing him to drive when he was still willing to after the long delay.

This reminds of of when I was in Oslo back in 2014. We ordered food at a small restaurant after confirming they accepted credit cards. When it came time to pay, the woman behind the counter refused to scan our credit cards because they had no chips. (It would have worked, every other card terminal we'd used in the country still supported magstripe, and I saw that her machine had a scanner. She didn't say the reader was broken or anything, just refused to try.)

We didn't have cash, so we just left. The woman was furious. We hadn't received our food yet, but it was already being cooked. She screamed at us to go to an ATM a few blocks away, get cash, and come back. We just found another restaurant. If the card hadn't worked I would've felt bad and probably done that, but she wouldn't even try it. Don't advertise that you take credit cards and get mad when customers try to use them.

> It would have worked, every other card terminal we'd used in the country still supported magstripe, and I saw that her machine had a scanner. She didn't say the reader was broken or anything, just refused to try.

Just because the terminal has a magstripe reader on doesn't mean her merchant account provider accepts it. Plenty don't, or some transfer the liability to the store in that case.

> If the card hadn't worked I would've felt bad and probably done that, but she wouldn't even try it. Don't advertise that you take credit cards and get mad when customers try to use them.

In 2014 a card that doesn't have a chip might as well be broken. I don't think you can put this one on her.

> In 2014 a card that doesn't have a chip might as well be broken.

Chips were basically non-existent on US cards in 2014.

That's true - but they were widespread pretty much everywhere else in the world including Norway. Up here in Canada we tend to say "Do you take interac?" instead of credit - but if credit is just the way people talk about chip-n-pin in Norway the understanding might be that walking into a store with a non-chip-n-pin card and asking for credit is dishonest.

I'm not Norwegian but it'd be pretty similar up here in Canada at this point - if your POS terminal gets damaged and your mag stripe reader breaks there isn't really a big reason to immediately shutter your store and replace it.

> In 2014 a card that doesn't have a chip might as well be broken.

2014. I don't remember with 100% confidence, but I'm pretty sure none of my (many) credit cards had a chip back in 2014.

Stores here didn't even start installing chip reader card stations until ~2018 or so.

OK sure, but in 2014 in Norway a card without a chip might as well be broken. If I turned up to a restaurant where you are, asked if I could pay by card, ordered, and then busted out my UnionPay card and demanded they accept that, would you say that was reasonable?

> "I wouldn't applaud it being adopted since the raised numbers make it easier to read by eye."

I disagree with this. The new-style card numbers are printed in a much more legible typeface, with more contrast than the old raised numbers. Much easier to read IMO, although the blind may disagree! I've had no issues with the ink wearing off on any of my cards.

Of all of these, which is the most secure?

> is still possible

Wait what?

I think in many parts of the world that isn't possible anymore for a long long time. Like all of EU.

Europe had dramatically more credit card fraud than the US, so Europe mandated EMV decades before the US.

It will be many years before US merchants truly phase out accepting magnetic strips.

I wonder how many trillions of credit cards have become microplastics in our oceans over the many decades...

It's probably trivial to other sources of plastic pollution. Most people get what, maybe one new credit card and one new debit card every 4-5 years? By volume it's nothing compared to the average person's consumption of single-use plastics like packaging, etc.

> "Swiping pressure-sensitive paper over the raised numbers (the original method) is still possible, though I haven't seen a merchant actually do this since maybe the mid-2000's."

I've noticed all the UK-issued cards I've received in the last year or two no longer have the raised numbers. Just the same details printed in ink on the card. Quite an improvement as the card details are easier to read now!

Still seem to have the traditional (but almost never used) magnetic stripe, however.

The numbers are no longer raised on my US Amazon card, but due to gray-on-gray the numbers are much harder to read. Smaller numbers give more white space for a very clean design. So I get to see much better modern UX as I squint to read my card.

Not sure about Europe, but here in the US you can use the magstripe if your chip is broken. After three failed scans with the chip it lets you use the magstripe. I've always felt like it defeats the purpose - if the idea is that the chip is harder to clone, couldn't scammers just make fake cards with phony chips, and do that when they use it?

I'd say maybe it raises fraud alerts faster, but I had a friend who did this for every credit payment for like two months before she finally had them replace her broken card. (No idea why, since it was free.)

> "Not sure about Europe, but here in the US you can use the magstripe if your chip is broken."

Yeah, this used to be the case (years ago) in the UK too. But now days, most card readers no longer have magstripe readers on them. The chip is the backup now in case contactless fails!

> Swiping pressure-sensitive paper over the raised numbers (the original method) is still possible

I actually had to do this in 2013! Working as a waiter at Chili's, whenever the power went out (happened once or twice the year I worked there) we'd dig out a quite heavy apparatus and make carbon copies of the credit cards. Every time I used it, my customers commented they'd never seen such a thing before (I suppose the clientele was either too young or had bad memories).

Earlier last year, I was at Shake Shack when their online payment system went down. They decided to just stop charging people (even if they had cash!) and gave out free meals. I much prefer that system.

The magnetic stripe is basically phased out in Australia. Sometimes readers let you swipe if the chip doesn’t read after the second try, but the terminals actually don’t let you swipe otherwise and tell you to insert the card if you try!

It’s been like this for several years now - and tap to pay has basically been the default (for purchases under $100) for even longer.

I think the limit has been raised now? I bought something for around $130 and tapped for it the other day

It was raised to $200 when the pandemic went into full swing, for 3 months initially and was extended. Most recent thing I found about it is from Sept last year - https://www.auspaynet.com.au/resources/ContactlessLimits

PayPal was founded on this premise in 1998: Contactless payments through Palm Pilots. Wasn't a new idea at that time either.

I distinctly remember, over ten years ago, paying with PayPal at a restaurant in Austin. That's why I have a profile pic on PayPal. The waitress requested I take one as it was the biometric ID method used.

I'm pretty sure it was a tap to pay with the app. I can't remember if the other device was also iOS. It was definitely not the kludgy QR codes like it is now.

I thought it was so cool, but it never caught on. I read a while later that PayPal was licensing that tech and let the license expire.

When I visited Australia in 2015, I was really impressed with the ubiquity and speed of TAP to pay. We aren't quite their in the USA yet, but I do 90% of my payments outside using my Apple watch (with a bit of a lag that I didn't see in Aus). At least we aren't stuck using QR codes.

2011 was when I saw country McDonalds adopt contactless in Australia. From then it was a pretty quick adoption for it to be ubiquitous.

I'm currently on a trip back to Australia and I forgot my wallet (!!), but it's fine because I just use Apple Pay everywhere. It's never once been a problem.

In Italy RFID payments have been a thing since 1989

Unfortunately this is one of those cases where being among early adopters wasn't an advantage, in many areas of Italy cash is still the only viable payment method.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telepass

> in many areas of Italy cash is still the only viable payment method.

cough tax avoidance cough

As an Italian I can't disagree, cabs not accepting credit cards infuriate me evrytime, but there's also a strong cultural resistance to change here.

Also friction plays a part, Italy is the second oldest country in the World on average.

My mom uses electronic payments, but I haven't been able to teach her how to pay online or "tap to pay" no matter how hard I tried.

I won't even start to talk about my dad, who doesn't even own a smartphone or a mobile phone before the smart ones existed.

They prefer to go to the ATM and pay cash, their lifestyle is very far from globalized even though they are strongly against tax evasion and always ask for their receipt.

Ironically I've know about Telepass because my parents have been using it for as long as I can remember.

My guess is that they trust Telepass because it's backed by a (former) public institution, Autostrade, but they don't trust mobile phone manufacturers or payment processor companies as much.

I'm not sure they are completely wrong.

I worked in the mobile industry back in 2010s. Every carrier had big shiny projects called "mobile payments" going on. They were exploring, together with banking partners how they could revolutionize contactless payments.

A key factor why all these project failed wasn't the technology. As you rightly point out, the technology was already available back then. It was mainly the vast differences in business models in the two industries: telcos and banking. The telcos were spoiled back then and expected any service to deliver a margin of at least 30%. Banks operated on a very different operating margin for the transactions. They never got that reconciled.

I remember back when Apple introduced Apple Pay many people were stunned by how little they charged. But in the end, that was their key insight to make this work. Quite impressive from a company with very high margins on their core products.

Given transaction volumes, I imagine Apple will make more money from Apple Pay than the App Store soon, even with an order of magnitude smaller rake.

Honestly, I think it was Apple refusing to fully support NFC until 2016 that prevented the market from jumping on contactless payments, at least in the US. They were holding something like a third of the market back from doing it which really made selling adoption to merchants difficult.

Contactless bank cards were widespread in the UK before Apple or Google had their own payment systems. I think the "real story", as it were, is that the banking industry held contactless payments way more than Apple ever did.

Right, and with the advent of NFC in phones, US consumers didn't need the banks' permission to pay contactlessly. Despite this, contactless payment adoption was still slow in the U.S. even though most phones had NFC, it wasn't critical mass until Apple finally decided to support NFC technology.

I would argue it was a myriad of factors. Here in NY the adoption of OMNY and the pandemic contributed far more than Apple rolling out Tap to pay. The biggest issue being merchants lacking having the motivation to move away from outdated readers.

You do actually need the bank's permission to enroll a card for Apple/Android Pay, it is a feature they have to support.

It is today with different added features, but back in the 2010s you didn't need your bank to support it. You could do it with your VISA/Mastercard/AMEX credit or debit card.

In what country? I tried to add my cards to Google Pay the day it came out and some were allowed and others weren't.

That's probably because Google Pay was second gen w/ additional features. Google Wallet accepted all my bank (credit union) debit and credit cards.

This is correct. The other comment that I can't reply to is incorrect. Banks not supporting apple pay were a significant holdup to NFC payments in the US.

There was an attempt to deploy contactless cards in the US in the mid 00's. I used mine once at a grocery store. Merchants rarely supported them so banks stopped issuing them.

This is not true!

Sorry for the passion but i was involved in the mobile payment scene at the time. It was not the banks halting the development of mobile payment. It was: 1- Apple 2- MNOs (Mobile Network Operators) 3- Samsung

Apple closed off the iphone NFC api which dried up VC funding in the mobile payment scene. This is one of the reason we have QR Codes everywhere today, and not NFC tags.

To securely process mobile payment, you needed to have a secure enclave (SE) on the phone which would keep encryption keys safely. At the time, the MNOs wanted that secure enclave to be the SIM card, so they could control that space. Google retaliated by cutting some circuitry between the SIM Card and the phone: the SWI lines. Banks were charging north of a million $ to embed applications in the SIM Cards, and were charging you the same for any update. Apple at the time started charging 4 million $ as a deposit to acquire a special nfc permission (walmart and starbucks had one) to emulate a credit card.

Samsung was the worst. They were already embedding a Secure element in their phones without giving access to it. They started 2 or 3 years ago giving access to 3rd partys.

You're replying to someone talking about contactless card payments, and you're talking about mobile payments. They are not the same thing.

GP originally replied to my comment about contactless payments, not cards. In the US their adoption was synonymous.

Contactless card payments and mobile payments are the same under the hood. It's just ISO 14443 at the end of the day. Mobile payments are just Host-Card Emulation (HCE).

Some links: - https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/connectivity/nfc/... - https://xamoom.com/new-nfc-capabilities-for-all-iphones/

>Apple closed off the iphone NFC api which dried up VC funding in the mobile payment scene. This is one of the reason we have QR Codes everywhere today, and not NFC tags.

Yep, this was my experience as well, working in the NFC space at the time. Apple also basically forced the whole IoT space to start focusing on QR codes instead of NFC tags, because they were lagging technologically with the iPhone.

Apple never played a significant role in any project since their install base was just too small.

Apple is a company with a clear focus. They didn’t even support MMS in the first iPhone. Rightly so.

If Apple wouldn't have effectively crippler innovation by not providing NFC (and later one locking it down) we probably would have contact less payment and many other similar services by now everywhere.

I know of multiple pilot projects and startups which where basically killed (or majorly revamped) because just supporting Android wasn't viable and Apples not showing any intention to support NFC.

The fact that the NFC we have now is missing a major feature of original NFC isn't helping either (the ability to act as a NFC card if the device it's embedded in is powered of/out of battery).

I haven’t used cash in Australia in about 5 years, maybe longer.

Thanks, I was actually pretty confused by this at first glance.

As a non-Apple-user I've never personally used the feature, but I still thought that stuff like Tap to Pay was a somewhat large selling point for the Apple Watch. So for a second I wondered if I had just been drastically misunderstanding how that worked for a long time and had somehow never actually checked/verified that iPhones/Watch could do that.

I use it nearly every day and definitely for almost every purchase I make. I no longer carry around a wallet now that digital IDs are a thing and have only had 1 situation in the last 6 months where I needed a physical card because they had TTP disabled on their terminal.

That's impressive, I want to live where you do! I swear there's one major retailer by me (never remember until I'm at the terminal) that still has tap to pay disabled. Catches me every time.

I'm down to just a 4 card MagSafe wallet (credit/debit/ID/car key), but I'd love to get to just a phone. Sadly I'm sure Wisconsin will be another 5-10 years before supporting digital ID.

I'm down to just my backup card in my MagSafe wallet. I'll occasionally keep my ID in there too but only if I know I'm going out to a place that needs to check a physical ID. If I could, I would do without the wallet completely.

A few years ago I was surprised that in some states it is illegal to go out in public without an ID in the event a cop stops you and asks for ID. Seems completely contrary to everything we were taught growing up.

I am not a lawyer, but I am fairly certain that that isn't true (if you're not driving).

Many states require that you identify yourself (presumably full name and DOB at a minimum) to an officer upon request, but I don't think that means you have to carry the physical card, just provide your identity (which can be done verbally).

Walmart and Home Depot seem to be major holdouts in the U.S. I wonder what they’re waiting for.

Home Depot is exactly the one that I wasn't able to use it at. I don't go there too often, though, so it's one of those things where I plan for it when I need to go now.

In my area most restaurants with table service don't have an easy way to do tap-to-pay (a few chains have something at the table for you to pay at that supports it). Also two of my most common retailers do not (Kroger and Home Depot). Very few gas stations support it, though the one closest to me recently added it.

Kroger and Home Depot

Yep, Kroger and Home Depot are the biggest stores I've been to recently that don't take tap-to-pay, but there are some other national chains.

Also recently: my neighborhood florist, doughnut shop, parking garage, and hamburger stand don't take tap-to-pay. I've never been to a gas pump that does, though they all have the logo for it on the front. Every time I've inquired, the people inside say it's not enabled.

Record stores are about 50%. The one I went to most recently, I had to show them how to do it.

But interestingly, my shoeshine guy does take tap-to-pay.

I always keep at least one backup card and some cash in my wallet. I recently had to make an emergency trip to the Walgreens at 5am, and its credit card/tap system was down. It was cash-only for about a week. Glad I had cash backup so my family member's health wasn't held hostage by a technology glitch.

In the UK, they bring the card reader to your table and the transaction completes wirelessly. If you want to add a tip, you type the amount into the reader before you tap.

Increasingly public transport supports contactless instead of tickets or proprietary NFC systems - notably the whole of London supports contactless and I've not used an Oyster card in years now.

I've also not seen a card reader that doesn't support contactless since at least 2015, possibly longer. I'm not sure, but based on how quickly contactless rolled out from 2007, I suspect they'd been adding support to the hardware a well before it was enabled.

I know everyone says it but USA really needs to do better. It doesn't make sense that this is so uniquely difficult to rollout there.

Many gas stations are still magnetic strip only. It was the majority as of a couple of years ago, but it's shifting quickly. That said, I still very frequently encounter gas stations that don't accept chip or tap, only strip.

I can pay with contactless / Apple Pay almost everywhere, except the largest grocer chain in Texas - H-E-B - doesn't support it. Unfortunately, this is where I make most of my purchases, so I end up using Apple Pay on infrequent other shopping trips.

I honestly don't see what's so revolutionary about this. Why would anyone shell out multiple hundreds of € when a device that accepts payments can be purchased for a fraction of the iPhone price?

E.g the most expensive device here [1] is only 120 €, and it can also print the bill. The cheapest that does the job is a mere 20 €.

Well, if you already have an iPhone ? I would assume this is for small vendors? Otherwise indeed I do not see the point.

Might be big for bigger vendors too. I know Oracle extorts at least some merchants at least a few hundred dollars per year per credit card terminal for the privilege (“interface license fee” or some BS) of being able to use it. The more some of these legacy middlemen get taken out of the picture, the better.

Might be big for bigger vendors too

The POS terminals for BlueMercury (a national cosmetics chain) are iPad Airs with a tap-to-pay reader bolted on them. This would remove that bulk, expense, and potential point of failure.

Because a lot of people, going by the sales numbers, have iPhones? It’s more for very small businesses, who just need a quick and easy way to take card payments. Larger outfits will naturally invest in “real” PoS devices.

Plenty of sole trader workmen and taxi drivers and the like have the square terminal that, I just checked, costs €20. €20 to take payments from 100% of your customers rather than the 30-40% market share iPhone has here seems like a no brainer to me.

I think you misunderstand the product. You can take payments from any contactless credential. That means credit cards, Apple Pay, google pay, Samsung pay, and so forth.

Ah, the key piece is this statement:

> At checkout, the merchant will simply prompt the customer to hold their iPhone or Apple Watch to pay with Apple Pay, their contactless credit or debit card, or other digital wallet near the merchant’s iPhone, and the payment will be securely completed using NFC technology

The language is a bit verbose, but does look like it supports standard NFC based contactless also.

I can’t speak for America but in the U.K. there have been terminals that do this that small independent businesses have used for years. They connect to your phone too and work with both Android and iOS. You see taxis, street food sellers and all sorts using them. They also cheap and yet still look a hell of a lot more professional than this thing does.

https://merchantmachine.co.uk/contactless/

Note that some of these even have chip and pin readers for those without contactless.

It is the same in the states with Square (among others), but the ease of “I have to do nothing” is nonetheless extremely alluring to the most adhoc of businesses.

They're fairly common in the U.S., as far as 2015 that I remember, except they're often flaky, rely on Bluetooth and have their own battery, which many means merchants who don't use them that often would switch them off to save the battery. And with your iPhone, it's likely you have it charged and turned on at all times.

Sorry, by ”this thing”, do you mean an iPhone? That it looks less professional to use a phone than a dedicated card reader? I can see it, I was just genuinely a little thrown by the wording.

Sorry yeah. I don’t know why I shouldn’t trust tapping on someone’s iPhone but it doesn’t scream “professional shop” in the same way that those card readers do. Even though those card readers are very cheap and ostensibly work the same, they just feel more “professional”.

Because you still usually need a mobile device the modern cashless till today is an iPad with an NFC dongle to take payments now you can skip the dongle..

The UX of an iPhone is much better than most legacy card terminals and as others have said, many people already own one and thus wouldn't need anything other than installing an app.

Think of all the e waste and logistics saved by avoiding third party payment hardware that would’ve previously been needed to support accepting contactless payments.

If you already have an iPhone you don't need to buy an extra device, obviously.

€120 for a CC processing terminal with the fees for setup? Doubt it. That’s the price of that little printer alone. Else they’ll be paying them back in processing fees.

Sumit, and others..

Not only that, but also the potential for lock-in should be a reason to not use this.

You haven’t seen businesses using things like Square on an iPad or iPhone as a pseudo POS system? Square even has a contactless reader on the Apple Store. Presumably, now businesses do not have to use those third parties anymore.

American merchants doing low customer volume (e.g. small shop, cafe, restaurant) are usually locked into using something like a terminal from First Data (~$150-200 USD minimum for the most basic device) and something in the ballpark of 2.2% to 2.7% in fees for every transaction. People paying the lower rate are doing over $50k per month in transaction volume.

Compare that to competitors in the space like Square, which costs ~$300 USD and charges ~2.6% plus a flat 10 cents per transaction.

If you're not doing over $50k in volume per month and already have an iPhone...you might as well just use the Square app and take NFC payments on your phone instead of investing in the reader (assuming you're operating in a space where consumers will readily have NFC payments ready).

The basic square hardware is about 1/5 the price you listed, but I don't think it's the price, but the effort – filling a form in the app vs waiting for a package to arrive in the mail, and setting up some extra hardware (What I must wonder is what Apple charges Square for this feature)

It has probably been 5 years since I've encountered the most basic Square reader in the wild (the $10 magstripe one), and I can think of a single time in the past two years I've encountered the cheap one you're referencing (which is why I forgot about it in the first place).

I see these $50 ones all the time:

https://squareup.com/shop/hardware/us/en/products/chip-credi...

Plus if your customer drops this, they're not breaking your expensive iPhone screen.

Yeah, those. I basically never see them anymore. There was a short time where they seemed pretty common, but I honestly only remember seeing one once in the last two years, at a farmers' market booth. All the vendors I frequent that used to use that have either upgraded to the full-function $300 Square terminal, or moved to using other solutions like Toast or Clover.

I suspect the real benefit is situations where the seller comes to you. A cafe can have an additional piece of equipment sitting on the counter for taking payments, but if you're a handyman or something, going to someone's house, being able to take payment on the spot using the phone already in your phone seems like a valuable convenience.

And wait until you can accept bitcoin payments without having to install a bitcoin wallet: https://9to5mac.com/2021/12/28/comment-tim-cook-said-apple-i....

AFAIK and from my experience in many counteris PoS terminals are pretty expensive + they require you to have a constant cash flow otherwise they take it from you.

So basically apple is trying to move into square’s business model? What about chips and swiping? Will apple provide a solution for that?

Square's hardware business model, they'll just be a software company now

The real news is Apple specifically took a non competitive stance — making the API available to third parties like Stripe - rather than building in house, leveraging Apple Card connections, or similar

They probably don't want any more anti-competitive criticism right now.

I am surprised Apple didn't make this a closed system and compete with Square for small businesses.

Think it depends on the lens you view this with.

If it's iphones have reached saturation with small business owners, let's build a business on top of that already dug and locked in moat, then perhaps.

If it's offering this feature is a driver for more small business owners buying and sticking with iphones and the accompanying ecosystem, you can see how it's perhaps the smarter play to be an open platform here.

Right - the last thing Apple wants is to let Google take the high ground of "only our platform makes this business-critical API available to multiple apps, therefore if you're a small business owner you need to choose Android."

It competes with anyone selling point of sale hardware. I think Square falls into that camp, no? I wouldn't want to be in that space right now. I don't see how this doesn't usurp a big chunk of their market since it isn't even a decision between buy this or buy that, but buy that or just use the thing already in my pocket.

I assume Square makes vastly more on fees than on hardware, so the opportunity to make fees off more merchants who have a smaller barrier to entry is probably beneficial, even if they don't buy hardware.

Fees are definitely where the money is made in the payments sector, however, most proper terminals are leased so that represents a fairly large source of revenue for merchant service providers. A company I worked for were leasing terminals starting at £20 a month, and then took a cut of transactions plus a whole host of other bolt-ons like PCI non-compliance fees (which is it’s own racket, they’re not incentivised to ensure merchants are PCI compliant because it’s a significant revenue stream).

Anyone who is going to be buying PoS from Square at a rate greater than just the phone attachment reader, this won't be sufficient for. Using a phone for a business you personally run is fine, using a phone as the central point of your business for even a relatively small fast casual is going to be a nightmare.

And for those even on Square Apple's ipads are still the preferred choice as far as I can tell. So there isn't much of a benefit other than fees.

For anything larger than a small fast casual you quickly run into greater integration needs with things like KDS (of which a few do use tablets, Toast, Fresh, etc, and even then I think ipads are preferred. I know Square integrates with a few of those as well as NorthStar so, I don't think they may have much to fear other than at the low end mom and pop stores.

POS and payment hardware used to be a fairly high margin vertical hardware business, but I don't think so any longer. The real goal now is merchant / customer acquisition and service lock in. Basically I'd expect the hardware will be given away at some point.

I'm not even sure there, at least for another few years. No store, mom and pop or otherwise, would want to be "tap to pay only" as a means of taking credit card payments. There are still plenty of cards out there that don't have RFID chips.

Wow really? That’s surprising for some reason. Here in Australia that’s super common, RFID is in every card you can think of.

If I go to the farmers market on the weekend, they all accept cash or tap-to-pay with a Square tap-only reader, and that’s it.

Payments and mobile service are some of the more weird things about the US given how easily startups or new tech is developed there. There last time I was in the US was years ago. I still had to swipe my card in a few places and getting a new SIM involved me having to talk to someone. By this time in Australia contactless payments were almost everywhere and you just needed to go to a convenience store to get a SIM and activate online.

It looks like they are going through similar weird things with instant bank transfers. In Australia all the major banks just have instant transfers built in. I use the bank app to transfer to friends and they get notified. In the US you Venmo or PayPal or whatever.

Yeah, the US is finally starting to catch up with contactless. Other countries have been strange as well. My understanding is it was popular in Canada for awhile, but then terminals started disappearing?

The first time I was able to use ApplePay (as an American) was on a trip to NZ. In fact, the clerk at the gas station was shocked to see someone pay with their phone, even though this had been possible with Android for some time, and even though contactless itself was old hat there.

As for the SIM thing, that just depends so much on the business model and regulatory environment. Pay as you go is relatively unpopular in the US, and the availability reflects that. But it's not like Italy, where I had to hand over my passport (!) to get a SIM, or Germany, where I had to document where I was "living". I've heard it's even worse in, say, Chile, where you virtually need to be a citizen or permanent resident to get a SIM.

Yea... the Apple Card doesn't have RFID chips.

Why would it, you have your iPhone, right?

Yea, practically speaking the physical card is just a trinket to get people to sign up for the card.

BUT contact free payment via card and Apple Pay contact free payments are slightly different and I’ve been to POS terminals that had one but not other. But the point was that there exists cards that don’t have nfc capabilities, including the one made by the company at center of article.

> I’ve been to POS terminals that had one but not other.

They are very, very similar that this surprises me. Apple/Google pay implement the same standards as wireless cards and it should Just Work(TM) everywhere the cards can be accepted. Obviously real life and 'should' don't always marry up.

But it was one of the big drivers of acceptance of the tech in most places - the infrastructure is already there! You probably don't even need to update the firmware on your reader!

> including the one made by the company at center of article.

Sure, but my point is that I believe that's deliberate, because they want you to use the contactless payment capability of your phone. I don't doubt there are other cards out there without the capability, I just think the apple one isn't a great example.

No one uses a mag reader here in Canada. Europe ditto, and sounds like the antipodes too. I don't know anyone who doesn't have RFID cards, debit or credit. Swiping a card through a mag reader is the backup option alone here.

I'm in the US. It's not uncommon here. In fact, two of my cards, a Chase Visa, and an Amex, both only support mag stripe and chip; they do not have an RFID chip in them. I could get them replaced, but why? Every POS system supports those; not everyone supports tap to pay.

The US may be an anomaly here, but it always has been. The UK had chip and pin roll out while the US still had mag stripe being the most common; we slowly added chip and signature (we still don't have chip and pin), and now we still aren't anywhere close to universal in tap to pay.

> No store, mom and pop or otherwise, would want to be "tap to pay only" as a means of taking credit card payments

In the USA maybe. Elsewhere it's already huge.

Yep, my apologies for the US centric mindset in the comment; I can't speak to elsewhere.

This was my initial thinking, but then I think most businesses won't want to use a phone as their payment platform. My reasoning is that when I go into a business and I tap the Square terminal, I am assuming that terminal belongs to the business, because what individual would have their own square terminal.

If the person who is ringing me up has an iPhone, and says "just tap this", there is a part of me that is wondering if this is the company's iPhone, or their personal device? Of course, this is easily resolved with the right surround which would remove this question, but I think it's somewhat valid.

Isn't this how it works in Apple stores (I'm not an apple person). Don't they walk around with iPhones in this big chunky yellow cases, and then you just pay for stuff through that? Maybe I'm wrong...

Are you concerned about a malicious employee using their own iphone to steal the money? Why couldn't they give you their own square terminal? On that note, when you pay cash why can't they just pocket whatever you give them?

I don't see why you care anyway, they would be stealing from the store, not from you. You would already have whatever item you are buying.

Because I can somewhat trust the Square terminal will show the correct amount? If I swipe some random persons iPhone, whats stopping them from showing a $10 total and charging $1000?

Is the iPhone gonna print a receipt?

This is an interesting to think about. Say you're at an ice cream stand that has a Square Reader (the little square hockey puck reader) that's paired with an iPhone running Square's payment reader.

The merchant rings you up for $5, shows you the phone in their hand indicating the cost, and the Square Reader lights up to show it's ready for payment. You pay via inserting your credit card, which processes in a few seconds, and then the payment is complete. The merchant is no longer showing you the phone, and presumably hits "No Receipt".

However, the merchant actually has a second out of sight device that is set to charge $500 and is actually paired with the Square Reader. Because you've paid with a physical card, there's a good chance you won't notice the charge till you go to pay your credit card or check your bank account.

This would probably be a short-lived scam, as the merchant's malicious Square account would have to be linked to a bank (I think this is the only option), which would identify them. I'm pretty sure Square requires ID verification of some sort as well. So reporting this malicious transaction to your bank/credit card would flag them.

Additionally, if you're paying via a mobile wallet, you'll likely get an immediate notification saying "You paid $500 to Malicious Ice Cream Vendor".

Now let's think about Apple's new plan. It could be that Apple layer's it's own mandatory interface that shows "Pay $5 to Ice Cream Vendor" regardless of the app being used. Maybe this is actually the employee's phone instead of the company's device, but that's the same as the employee stealing cash out of the register, so not really your issue.

Or Apple could not layer it's own UI, and just open up the radio as an API. Apple could require that apps that use this API to have some additional verification to prevent someone from making an app that displays "Charge $5" when it's really charging $500.

All that being said, I only see smaller merchants using iPhones + Square Readers. Maybe some boutique stores, food trucks, etc. Once a store gets large enough, they usually want dedicated hardware, even if it's a Square Stand.

---

Here's Square's hardware page if you want visuals: https://squareup.com/au/en/hardware

Wouldn't you just get a notification on your phone from your credit card or bank app to say how much the transaction is for and to whom. Then you'd know straight away that something is wrong.

Can’t you turn on in your bank app to get a push notification immediately on every transaction? I have this turned on for both of my credit card accounts, so literally within a second or two of tapping or inserting (whether physical card, or Apple Pay on the watch or phone) I get a notification telling me how much was just charged to my card.

Useful for double checking that something hasn’t gone wrong and I haven’t been charged the wrong amount! I’d also see if a fraudulent transaction went through.

Why do I currently trust any contactless payment terminal to debit the right amount from my Visa card ? The trust is built with every transaction.

The first time I used one of those strange little white terminals it seemed a bit dodgy ... but you pretty quickly come to trust that what's on the screen is what gets debited.

Also I doubt Apple would leave a nice app-accessible text field on the Tap To Pay dialog where I can insert my fake amount. Right ?!

You don't have to trust them, you trust your credit card company. All you have to do is tell them its fraud and the charge goes away.

So, yes, it is a concern about a malicious actor. Likely an employee, but hey, with just an iPhone and a big enough store, can't anyone just pretend to be an employee?

I would like to go to a store where I trust the business, the employee, and the entire pipeline. I understand that is idealistic, but yes, this is how I feel. It's like saying "why do you care if the employee is underpaid, you're saving money", which describes the whole tipping culture in the US.

To accept the payment successfully you must have a merchant account and have completed some KYC with one of Apple's payment partners though, surely?

A colleague of mine owned a lunchstand, where the cook brought in his own receipt printer and used it for a large portion of daily business, and later bought the business.

Square readers are dirt cheap, like $60 or less. If an employee wanted to defraud their workplace like that, it's no barrier. They'll be caught when the shop reconciles things.

Why would you need a special surround? And why is that an issue for you the consumer?

A bunch of the Square payments are done using a company owned iPad that sits in a Square holster

Square probably makes zilch on their hardware sales as it is, the real business is percentages on sales.

Square's primary business is credit card processing. The hardware is secondary at best. (It might not even be sold at a profit!)

I would be very surprised if Apple tried to enter the credit card processing industry. It isn't the sort of thing they're positioned to do well.

It competes with anyone selling point of sale hardware

No.

It allows sole proprietors, freelancers and the like to not have to get a Square reader to take credit card transactions. That's super convenient, especially for getting a deposit from a client, for example.

It also requires a newish iPhone (iPhone XS or later device), so there will still be plenty of iPhones out there that won't support this.

Square sells hardware, but losing money on that. I don't believe it is intended to compete with payment processors providing hardware, but more so commoditizes it/flattens existing players in cases where a POS terminal system isn't needed.

They're playing the long game. Apple wants market usage to build bargaining power with the banks. They saw how the original Google Wallet was blocked from adoption because of control by the carriers and banks. Remember ISIS Mobile Wallet? (That name aged terribly..)

We saw how it took 10+ years and a dominating market position for Apple to show their claws with controlling 3rd parties with the App Store. Make no doubt that once a significant portion of the market uses Apple hardware or services for transactions, that they will want control and a cut of the transaction.

Notice how they say: partner-enabled iOS app

This means Apple has to endorse each 3rd party, and they remain under Apple's control just like app developers.

> We saw how it took 10+ years and a dominating market position for Apple to show their claws with controlling 3rd parties with the App Store. M

Really? I thought Apple's position was fairly consistent and it took 10+ years for the companies using the App Store to get antsy.

That's a fairly revisionist view of history. Large partners had earlier had special pricing (ex: Netflix) lax enforcement of rules (ex: Facebook). Blowups where Apple presumed the right to levy a fee are also well known (Amazon book sales, Uber fares).

The smaller fish got consistently screwed and no one was happy per se, but the sheer stupidity of Apple's recent actions do not help matters. For example, the app store cut is 30% unless you beg for scraps as a small business at which point you can get 15% until you start making $1 million. Income cliffs aren't how real taxes work (let's be clear here: Apple is pretending to be the government with taxes and fees and shadow court system of app review), they're just how Reagan demonized them back in the day.

Fair point about the previous inconsistent enforcement. Thanks

Yes, Apple is increasingly competing with Governments of the worlds, in taxation of digital ecosystems, I am sure as they sabotage this market by these steep taxation, their will be blow back from governments as well after lobbying form business, They are not so small now like Nintendo that they can get away with this steep cuts. Problem is that governments will retaliate by arm twisting apple to approve third party app stores, which will be bad for whole iPhone ecosystem.

I think on the vendor side it's a lot harder than it looks. This isn't the kind of thing Apple is good at.

I am surprised Apple didn't make this a closed system and compete with Square for small businesses.

Apple isn't Microsoft. When was the last time Apple created something consumer facing from scratch instead of using industry standards or market leaders if they exist? They generally don't explicitly compete with commodity businesses unless there's something unique they're attempting to accomplish. They do stuff just because they can.

They partnered with the banks to create Apple Pay.

They partnered with Goldman Sachs and MasterCard to create the Apple credit card.

Besides, it would be a huge undertaking to build out a payment platform like Square to compete with them. Of course they could have bought any number of payment processors if they wanted to if they wanted to go that route.

Stripe and Shopify already have millions of customers so it only makes sense to partner with them.

The obvious thing most people on this thread is this being the basis for Apple's cryptocurrency aspirations.

Tim Cook owns some and he said Apple as a company is looking into cryptocurrency [1]. It only makes sense that Apple will eventually support bitcoin and other transactions natively on the iPhone, peer to peer.

[1]: "Tim Cook said Apple is looking at cryptocurrency – Here’s what the company is likely to do" https://9to5mac.com/2021/12/28/comment-tim-cook-said-apple-i...

The most obvious things are their cash cows: the iPhone and the app store.

The M1 is also customer facing, vs partnering with Intel to make it

Did they not partner with TSMC?

IIRC, Apple wanted Intel to fab their silicon, but Intel refused. It’s only since Gelsiner took over that Intel is open to fabbing other designs.

> When was the last time Apple created something consumer facing from scratch instead of using industry standards or market leaders if they exist?

I'm too lazy to recall every detail, but it happened, often. Last exemple I have in mind is maps. As far as tech is concerned, I believe metal is their own inhouse invention?

I'm too lazy to recall every detail, but it happened, often.

Uh huh.

Last exemple I have in mind is maps.

They're working with several providers, including Yelp, Open Maps and Garmin. I've submitted corrections and additions to Apple Maps; anyone can do it.

As far as tech is concerned, I believe metal is their own inhouse invention?

Metal is a set of APIs for developers; it's not customer facing. Most users aren't going to know which graphics API their software uses. Apple supported and uses OpenGL for a long time and it's still available for backwards compatibility I believe.

It's a closed system in that the applications that are installed in the Wallet require approval from Apple and that includes fees as does the provisioning of the existing EMV and other Wallet applications (not the other Wallet uses like passes etc).

Not that we know of yet.

They can always take a competitive stance later, once small businesses have gotten rid of all their PoS hardware. This makes that initial adoption much easier.

I wonder if Apple would be wary of the regulatory attention that might attract.

While it will reduce how often card readers will be used, card readers will be around for a while yet. In many markets contactless (atlest with real plastic) still has limits requiring the card holder to validate themselves (in the UK it’s a max of £100 per transaction and £200 over multiple transactions) and some card holders dislike contactless completely so have cards without it.

So in those markets you will still need supporting hardware for the times you can’t accept contactless or risk losing the sale.

True, but there is nothing to prevent completing biometric or PIN authentication on your own phone once you have tapped on the merchant's is there?

For me personally, I only use my real plastic when my battery is low on my phone. So you have to account for times may not have their phone with them.

My bank allows for location based security. If my phone is not near the location the card is being used I then have to use chip and pin instead of contactless (dead battery, poor cell service, unable to get a decent location fix because of the building, all these can trigger the need to revalidate).

And a lot of people still don’t have banking apps on their phone (one of the reasons banks had to support SMS 2FA when implementing Strong Customer Authentication).

I’m not too sure if the banks/ Visa/MC would be too happy allowing users to enter their pins on the retailers phone as pin pads are supposed to be encrypted.

We are seeing cards come with biometrics and pin pads on them, these cards will help with “card terminal less” transactions, but both bans will have to start issuing them and card users will have to be happy using them (I still know quite a few people who refuse to use contactless at all).

So imo those BlueTooth card terminals will be with us for a while to come, they will just be used less, which is why imo Apple worked with partners who already have such terminals as a fall back for whenever contactless can’t be used.

Why are you allowing your bank to know where you are 24/7? Is inputting a PIN really so bad?

Its done on your device, not on banks side iirc, but its an optional thing you can opt into if you wish, thats not the default config when opening an account (can also be toggled on/off at will in the app, so i'm not too worried about it tbh).

No, it's not done on-device. Think about it: they know where the merchant is for card-present transactions, so how do they know how far apart the card and your phone are if they don't know where your phone is?

Also not all banks are even universally issuing tap to pay cards. None of my credit or debit cards are yet

That is primarily a US issue. In EU/AU/CA/NZ and increasingly in Asia, EMV chip+pin and contactless(+pin) are used and mag stripe is specifically excluded from the new standards.

The iPhone has a secure element that will allow for it to implement the SCRP (Secure Card Reader for PIN) PCI standard.

So this allows for an iPhone/iPad/Android phone/tablet to implement EMV contact/contactless payments (obviously contact would require a physical card reader). Contactless payments above floor limits (eg in Australia $100) can require a PIN that would be entered through the tablet.

Presumably, in order to become an approved partner, you need to pay a kickback to apple.

And probably an NDA so that you can't reveal the kickback

Exactly! Same story as with Apple Pay: if you, as a card issuer, want your customers to use Apply Pay, you need to pay Apple.

Running "software POS" on Android does not require any special "partnerships" with Google, as access to NFC is open.

Apple relies on payment processors for ApplePay as well, so this is normal.

Hey! Apple Card is also a partnership (with Goldman Sachs). Goldman is not in acquiring business, so Apple had to find another partner

Android had that, just yesterday a merchant accepted my payment.

I was shocked reading the title thinking 'No way this isn't already on Apple devices'.

The right title would be “contactless collections”.

This is the outcome of Apple's 2020 acquisition of Mobeewave.

https://www.pymnts.com/apple/2020/apple-buys-mobeewave-for-1...

It essentially turns an iOS device into a POS system.

Apple already gets 15 bps for all Apple Pay transactions. I'm curious to hear the additional monetization Apple plans to get for this.

> Apple already gets 15 bps for all Apple Pay transactions

Bits per second? Beets per sale? Blackened pieces-of-eight per scurvy-rat?

Basis points

Basis points-- hundredths of a percent. so 0.15%.

I always remember "100 basis points = 1%". It's a little confusing since percentages are scalars, so really 1 bps is just the scalar 1/10000.

Beets per sale

Schrute Farms mode.

I was wondering how this was done.

How on earth was what amounted to a userspace app able to talk to the NFC hardware to the extent necessary to process payments?!

Presumably the app received the relevant entitlements to be able to do this...?

How on earth was it done securely, within the Mobeewave app?

The PCI Security Standards Council has been working on the Secure PIN on COTS (SPoC) standard for a few years: https://blog.pcisecuritystandards.org/new-pci-software-pin-e...

Check this out as well from Visa.

Disclaimer: I worked/work on this https://usa.visa.com/about-visa/newsroom/press-releases.rele...

Wow, that's really cool.

> In January 2020, Visa first showcased the power of “Tap to Phone,” an industry-first solution that transforms current generation Android smartphones and tablets into contactless point of sale terminals. Tap to Phone was Visa’s first offering that let sellers accept payments on the devices they already own, just by downloading an app. As of December 2021, there were more than 300,000 devices across 54 countries using Tap to Phone.

I'm curious how the overall transaction/security flow works, broadly speaking.

It sounds to me like you managed to figure out a solution that satisfies the security posture of the ordinary app sandbox (ie without requiring any entitlements on iOS, or priv-app partnerships on Android). That's kind of incredible IMO. Are you using the Secure Enclave on iOS, and if you are, what are you actually storing in there? I'm curious if Android gets to play too given that it doesn't have the same sort of security guarantees, and if so, how.

I also get the impression the actual validation/verification (including steps that I would assume would typically happen on a payment terminal) has been moved to the cloud somehow. I'm very curious how that works too.

Presumably you would've also needed to design something capable of withstanding absolute worst-case scenarios like memory inspection on a rooted phone, or NFC sniffing/proxying/emulation.

Maybe you're just sending all the card data straight back to the cloud? That would pretty much solve everything :)

Also... while engineers are always going to gravitate towards balanced analyses of benefits and tradeoffs, the questions above are not coming from that perspective :) I'm very happy to hear whatever you can share about the security of the platform. (I'm just a random consumer who occasionally boggles at JavaCard when I pay for stuff lol)

I am not quite at liberty or have the capability to fully explain all of it. But I can confirm Android is one of the main focus.

We actually have a video that showcases the real-life usage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OE6OmVd6Fxw&feature=youtu.be

A lot of what used to be done on Payment terminals are now done on the cloud.

I completely understand. Kudos to you and everyone who got it all working on Android, given its ridiculous fragmentation *before* you even start talking about NFC and reasoning about about device security :) - I'm guessing the chances are you're probably streaming/proxying the crypto I/O straight from the card into the cloud, thin-client style - basically taking what happens over NFC (which is man-in-the-middle resistant), sending that to the cloud directly without modification, then sending whatever comes back straight into the card. That approach could resonate with a shifting of work from payment terminals to the cloud.

Probably the most interesting story I read about the payment terminal space was about someone who happened to be working on an application/middleware integration and had figured out a cute way to use coroutines in C to (presumably/extrapolating a bit) multiplex the payment-online step while simultaneously settling the payment-offline step, so both could move forward simultaneously and the receipt could print almost immediately (in an era of dialup and maybe ISDN). The auditor who came out to validate and approve the middleware had a brain-BSOD and loudly protested that what he was seeing with his own eyes was not possible, and had to be convinced that the solution wasn't playing fast and loose with the spec requirements to do its thing :D

The payment terminal space seems like it was (and will probably remain for some time) an interesting engineering niche to work in (in terms of crazy application integration and whatnot). Been curious about it for a while with all the janky flickering I see on the screen when the receptionist swipes my healthcare card at the doctor's office (which can process both bank cards and healthcare cards though what looks like a custom application). It'll be very interesting to see how the banking space moves to the cloud and off-the-shelf consumer devices start to replace proprietary terminals and whatnot (and then other industries slowly follow suit, maybe, in a decade or so). I note the press release mentions this infrastructure is available in Australia, but I incidentally haven't seen this in person yet (two years on). Will definitely be keeping an eye out now, and I obviously need to start shopping at more interesting places :P

Thanks for taking the time to share about this!

Not all iOS devices have NFC. This is an iPhone-only feature

MacBooks strangely doesn't have NFC - IMO it's ultimate solution for U2F.

I would love to pay websites by tapping my phone to my laptop.

Apple Wallet is already in macOS, but Apple Pay is only in Safari

There's no wallet on macOS; Safari does enable you to use Apple Pay on your Apple Watch or iPhone to pay for things on websites.

Yes, there is a wallet on macOS. If your macbook or keyboard has Touch ID, then you don't need your phone/watch to confirm that you are you.

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/use-wallet-apple-pa...

I use Wallet on macOS all the time with the built in Touch ID reader. I was actually surprised how many online stores accept Apple Pay via Safari. Even a local chain that delivers tacos takes it!

That's the fallback for Macs without a Secure Element/Touch ID (or, weirdly, when using the Mac with the lid closed).

Otherwise, you can add cards to your Mac just like on an iPhone or iPad!

iPhone XS or newer.

> I'm curious to hear the additional monetization Apple plans to get for this.

I don't think there will be any extra monetization - this is presumably just an API in a future iOS 15.x that can be enabled via entitlements Apple assigns, so unless Stripe says "extra 0.3% fee for iPhone PoS payments" they likely won't make any money from it. Think of it as a funnel for getting the last 20% of businesses to accept Apple Pay.

> "getting ... businesses to accept Apple Pay"

This isn't just Apple Pay. You can tap your plastic credit card to pay using this. This is all contactless transactions, not just Apple Pay.

They at least move some small retail owners from Android to iPhone, so they'll sell some iPhones.

If "bps" is supposed to stand for basis points, then you're saying they get a 0.15% cut?

Correct.

https://www.pymnts.com/in-depth/2015/apple-pays-business-mod...

I'm so pleased to see this happen in a way where its not tied to Apples own payment processor. They could so easily have done that to capture more revenue but I suspect it would have opened up more chance of an anticompetitive lawsuit.

Obviously they are going to vet which processors are allowed, but as a consumer you want that so you can be confident that the iPhone you are tapping your card against isn't skimming your account.

I suspect there is a revenue agreement with the processors allowed on.

*allowed

Thanks, fixed.

Protection against account skimming should happen on the customer's iPhone (it should only send data allowing a single transaction of a certain size) not the merchant's iPhone. If the customer's iPhone doesn't have that protection it's pretty easy for the merchant to hide a skimmer in their iPhone case / POS system / gas pump.

It looks like it's not just Apple Pay, it's excepts any card payment, the protection has to be on the merchant's iPhone.

I don't think tap to pay can be skimmed in the same way you can with swiping. You'd have to actually clone the data on the NFC chip, which isn't possible through a tap from what I understand.

I believe it's possible to perform a MITM attack on contactless cards.

From a quick google: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9220841

I do also remember reading about researchers at Cambridge University who were looking at this maybe 7-8 years ago.

Interesting! Wasn't aware of that. Is this something that's being actively exploited in the wild though? It won't let me read the actual paper so it's hard for me to tell how practical the attack is.

Impractical things have a tendency to become practical when enough money is involved:)

There's also this:

https://youtu.be/YmJ4ULncNwg // https://i.blackhat.com/asia-20/Thursday/asia-20-Galloway-Fir...

It’d be trivial for a rogue payment app to display one $ amount on the screen yet deduct another.

Display the $ amount on which device though? If you want to be secure, you display it on the customer's iPhone and have them confirm.

Either way though, this is different from skimming. Skimming allows the skimmer to make future transactions which is much much worse.

Absolutely agree, it ought to be displayed and then consented to based on that knowledge.

Right now with most contactless in shops in the UK you're left thinking "did they key that amount in right?" and if you're paranoid you ask for a receipt (from the machine, although merchants often drag their feet or try to give you one from the till not the reader!) and/or you check on the phone afterwards (which would be a pain if it showed an issue because by then it's a bit late!)

Presumably these apps will be heavily locked down and reviewed by Apple to mitigate this. Could also imagine iOS ux to help here (obviously could still be phished).

I suspect that Apple will have full control of the screen, like Apple Pay. Your POS app will call an apple+(stripe/other) api which will show the payment screen and enable the NFC hardware.

There will be no way of an app to display a fake payment screen in front of the real one, or accessing the NFT apis themselves. It's clearly one of the key reasons why Apple have not opened up the NFC hardware for outside developers.

This risk also applies to any card terminal where you pay contactlessly. In Europe, that effectively means every card terminal everywhere and a comfortable majority of card transactions (https://www.mastercard.com/news/europe/en-uk/newsroom/press-... says 75% of mastercard transactions in Europe are contactless).

The main protections against this are maximum limits for unverified contactless purchases (about €50, depending on the country) and banks outright guaranteeing customers against fraud (https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/financial-pr...).

No idea how that can translate directly onto phone-based terminals though. On cards, the extra-validation backup for suspicious/over the daily limit transactions is that the contactless machine asks you for your pin, but there's no way anybody should be typing their card pin into a random stranger's iPhone.

There are still attacks, eg. contactless purchase limits can be bypassed by simply telling the terminal "of course I am a CDCVM device, let me use the higher transaction limits":

(page 18, with pages 10 and 12 showing the Visa/MC limits) https://i.blackhat.com/asia-20/Thursday/asia-20-Galloway-Fir...

AFAIK there are no contactless limits in the US. Also usually no pins on credit cards in the US only debit cards.

Sure but that's something card networks already deal with via chargebacks. If merchants get caught doing that, they'll have their payment processor, the processors acquirer and Mastercard/Visa all over them like a bad rash.

You can guarantee that the merchants collateral, or any unpaid funds will be taken and used to automatically refund anyone that went near their readers, and if the money can't be claimed from the merchant, then the payment processor or acquirer will be forced to cough up.

All the card networks take this type of fraud very seriously. They understand that they only get to keep their very lucrative positions in this world if people 100% trust card readers to not rip them off, and to get easy compensation if they do. So they come down hard on businesses that threaten that trust.

Exactly, there's nothing really new here except the device being used. Risk to skimming with a phone is no different than a 3G enabled terminal. Ultimately you need a business account and legal agreements with a merchant - so in this case Stripe to start work and accepting payments.

But thanks to the App Store, there won't be rogue apps that can be downloaded and installed. Not to mention, the developer would have to have operating system entitlements that are only available to paid-up developers in good standing with Apple.

I think it only allows contactless payments. No matter if from a card or phone or whatever that is equipped with NFC payments that is compatible with the merchant app.

If they can assume connectivity it would be best to invert the flow and instead make the Customer receive an invoice ID from the NFC, then work directly with Apple servers to actually pay. Then the Business gets a push notification the invoice was paid.

That way the customer phone never actually sends anything directly to the business, and the only thing sent to the customer is basically public (sure, pay my invoice if you want...)

Skimming happens because you have to enter trusted things into _their_ device w/o any authentication mechanism for the device you're interacting with (the pump).

They are going to accept payments from contactless credit cards as well, so connectivity isn't assumed. If it could be, the flow you describe is brilliant.

I would really like to see it become normal for tipping people this way (that isn't at a cash register / tap) but with AirDrop.

For example, I recently had movers. I went out of my way to get a cash tip for them earlier. It would have been nice to skip that and just ping it at them somehow without awkwardly saying "Hey friend do you have Venmo? Apple Pay? CashApp? I'd like to tip you. What's your phone number?! Let me get that, thanks, bye, delete.".

This is NFC and a bit different but just my thoughts.

Eh, I hope it doesn't. Tipping needs to die out. I'd prefer to have the moving company pay the movers a living wage such that a tip would be unnecessary and politely refused.

I'd rather an industry standard payout, but the workers getting pay proportional to revenue is actually not a bad model. I just hate the analysis paralysis

This is obviously a bit flame-y / unrelated / political.

Regardless of how you personally feel about US wages and the 20% I already prepaid for tip through the company to them, to be able to send money to others would be useful.

There could be other cases besides tipping.

I'd be really interested to know what to properly call it, but IMHO this is the kind of thing that the market will never solve top-down because the structure of the relationship would never support it.

I think an on-the-ground solution that caters to the long tail would be the only thing that would basically survive. Everything else would succumb to social forces and basically just fizzle out.

AirDropping Apple credit could be an interesting pilot study, but I doubt Apple would do something like that sadly :/

Please don't confuse the restaurant industry where tips subsidize wages with the original idea of tipping as a sign of gratitude an thanks. A tip can be a meaningful and impactful way to say "You went beyond expectation, did an awesome job and I really appreciate it". Why would you not want that option?

Because it doesn’t actually work that way and it’s in no way an “option”. In reality tipping becomes expected and people withhold it when the service does /not/ meet expectation. That’s awkward and too confrontational for a lot of people so they’ll just tip anyways.

Personally I also find it exhausting to have to judge every single service I get. So I just tip a standard amount, there’s absolutely no feedback involved. So there is no point.

There are lots of downsides with very few upsides.

For situations where laws allow for sub-standard wages, such as restaurant wait staff, I agree with you. It's not really an option, it's exhausting, there's no point.

For situations that aren't codified into law like that, it can more legitimately be modulated according to how the service made you feel, from zero to "keep the change" to a couple bucks to sky's the limit.

The former should be solved by abolishing tipping. The latter should be solved by technology that's somehow as frictionless as cash.

> laws allow for sub-standard wages, such as restaurant wait staff

The law does not allow for sub-standard wages, however. If everyone stopped tipping today, wait staff would get the same minimum wage as any other job.

No, actually the law allows for below-minimum hourly wages for tipped jobs. That's the whole issue...

Employers are obliged to ensure that employees they are paying below minimum wage because the employee gets tips get paid at least minimum wage including tips.

If an employee lets their employer know they did not earn enough tips to meet minimum wage, then the employer must pay them more to ensure they get minimum wage.

Also, in many jurisdictions of the US where the same minimum wage applies to traditionally tipped employees, the tipping dynamic has remained. For example in California, Oregon, and Washington, the cultural expectation is that customers will still tip waiters, even though the waiters are earning the same minimum wage as everyone else.

For those curious, this is accurate according to Department of Labor: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/state/minimum-wage/tipped

However, I think the point being advocated in this thread is that businesses should have to pay minimum wage (before tips). That said, it would be interesting how employers would respond if that was required by law - since removing tips would not save the employer any money, I wonder if that would result in less hiring.

You can see the results in states that have no tipped minimum wage, such as WA/CA/OR.

Generally, restaurant prices are higher (minimum $25 per meal per person without alcoholic drinks), but tipping is still expected by the waiters for waited service. Bottom line is waiters earn more money, but possibly fewer people can afford to eat out and maybe there are fewer waiters overall.

I dislike waited food service anyway, I much prefer to just buy at the counter and bus my own table, and it might result in more restaurants like that.

What are your thoughts about using a counter and self-bussing but the clerk faces a tablet at you with 3 large buttons: 18%, 20%, 25% ?

Not only will the personal service be minimal, but the only part you can even judge at that point is how well they took your order... who knows if something will go south! So it's clearly just about keeping menu prices artificially low.

I have always been able to choose “no tip”, along with those other options.

If it was not there, then depending on who I was with, I would either walk out or eat the cost and then never go back and leave a review that says they bait and switch pricing.

Tipping is about price segmentation / discrimination. Good for the seller, bad for the buyer.

In Massachusetts, the minimum wage for tipped service staff is $6.15--appalling for 2022 with inflation hitting 30-year highs.

In reality in most of the world, that's simply untrue. To most people, the concept of "standard tipping" is absurd.

Mainly because it gives perverse initiatives to pay employees less and tipping to be standard not unusual gratitude. Sometimes you can't have nice things because the way society collectively behaves.

Tipping at a restaurant is the only place where I would tip face to face. Maybe a valet but I avoid that like the plague too since you're giving your car to someone and no accountability. Name a few face to face tipping scenarios besides food and valet that is common? I'm seriously blanking on anything.

Barber shop, movers, cab driver, bellhop, coat check person, doormen/building staff around the holidays

Maybe I'm a prude but I wouldn't tip for any of those services besides getting a hair cut. Need to add elevator driver and that guy in the bathroom who stands around and makes everyone uncomfortable.

If businesses see their employees making more, you can guarantee that they will reduce wages. Because total compensation is the bargaining chip in this contract between employer and employee, and what determines demand for that job. When this happens, it hurts the people who are less advantaged in making tips. You can find plenty informartion on how gender, race, age and appearance play a huge factor in making tips.

I'd prefer to have the moving company pay the movers a living wage such that a tip would be unnecessary and politely refused.

Clearly, you have no idea of how the moving industry works. Everybody's a contractor of a contractor of a franchisee. The person who picks up your stuff is not always the person who delivers it.

When I move (frequently), I make sure to tip each person packing my stuff $50, each person loading my stuff $50, and the driver $100 for < 1,000 miles, or $200 > 2,000 miles.

Lifting and carrying and handling other people's prized possessions isn't an easy job. This is how I show appreciation when the job is done well.

>Clearly, you have no idea of how the moving industry works.

It's really no answer to say I need to understand how each industry works.

Why would I? And why should I? It's the government's responsibility to understand the nuances of, and regulate, each industry.

Do we really want to live in a world where consumers need to understand the detail of how each industry operates so they can ensure sub-sub contractors can be remunerated appropriately?

While true that that could be nice, I don't think the burden of asking for an alternative like Venmo or CashApp like you listed is that high, and this case requires that the movers would also have an iPhone.

I had movers a couple months ago and tried to tip them. Note that I don't ever carry cash and am a proponent of abolishing the Federal Reserve. I asked them for their Ethereum or Bitcoin address, and they said, "neither of us don't have that, but we take cash." I calmly tried to explain to them the evils of the Federal Reserve for around five minutes, then began to set them up with their own cryptocurrency wallets on their phones. I then plugged in my Ledger Nano S and had them each read me their public keys, which I entered into Ledger Live and sent them each their five dollar tip. It was a simple process and did not take longer than thirty minutes. By the end of the exchange, they were both very happy with the arrangement and thanked me profusely for setting them up to use the future of currency, although I was still in the process of explaining its importance.

"Teach a man to fish," they say, and I believe I did it on that day. I encourage everyone else to do the same.

set them up with their own cryptocurrency wallets on their phones

What specifically did you have them set up?

Woosh

I can't tell if this is satire or not.

Looking at their comment history, I think they're actually serious.

it's clearly satire, just because he's into crypto doesn't mean he can't be cheeky about it

I was sure it was satire until I started reading GP's past comments. Definitely a very post-ironic moment.

I thought it clearly was sarcasm/satire, but now you've made me doubt.

I feel it has to be. Who is tipping their movers only $5?

Transfer fees on Ethereum are currently $2.75, so either the movers got $2.25 or the dude paid an extra 55% just to pay them in something that's less useful for them.

This line really should answer that question:

> By the end of the exchange, they were both very happy with the arrangement and thanked me profusely for setting them up to use the future of currency, although I was still in the process of explaining its importance.

Print and frame this content chain as a fine example of Poe's law.

Has to be a Reddit-style pasta, though I can't find it anywhere else...

Feels like Tom O'Donnell, who has written satire like that a long time ago

https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertari...

Given the 'about' section of their user says "you're all idiots" it seems reasonable to assume everything they say is either satire or an attempt at it.

Anon needs to move to El Salvador

>> I calmly tried to explain to them the evils of the Federal Reserve for around five minutes ... >> sent them each their five dollar tip ... >> It was a simple process and did not take longer than thirty minutes.

This is satire, right?

Reads like a real reddit post from 2009

Great copypasta material.

Bravo

This is art

I love this analogy[0], but to play devil's advocate I do a lot of tipping in cash and it's kind of a pain to break down big bills, so I can see some benefits to normalizing more digital options that actually work.

My bank is digital, it doesn't have a local branch, and most ATMs around me dispense cash in $20 bills. So I can make a small purchase near the ATM if it's in a shop and then ask them to give me change in smaller bills, but usually there's nothing I want. I don't have a local branch to drive to, but maybe other banks would help split bills? It's not awful, but it is pretty inconvenient.

Of course, the way to fix that might not be for everyone to standardize on iPhones, it might be to just have more ATMs that dispense smaller bills. But I do see why someone would find tipping primarily over, say, Venmo preferable, even though I don't think that appeal is enough to outweigh the benefits of cash tips (privacy, universal compatibility, simplicity, etc) in many situations.

Or I could just start tipping everyone everywhere in increments of $20 bills I guess, but I'm not that generous.

----

[0]: assuming you did actually mean it as an analogy for dropping cash for digital payments

I solve for this by stockpiling small bills in a drawer from which to replenish my wallet. I add to the pile by specifically paying with a large bill whenever the pile starts to dwindle, and I use a card whenever possible otherwise. The trick is to not habitually spend them except in situations (like tipping) where there's no reasonable alternative.

That makes sense. I think part of the problem is I'm trying to play both sides and mostly use a card for normal purchases, and mostly use cash for smaller purchases/tips. So you're right, I'm almost never using cash in situations that net me more small bills than I started with.

If I was a bit more consistent about occasionally just paying for something normal with cash it would possibly be more sustainable, right now I usually try to break apart small bills specifically when I'm completely out of them or when I know I'm going to need to tip someone in like an hour.

Also yeah, having a stockpile would probably be a good idea, since right now I typically only keep enough small bills to get me though my immediate tipping needs and no further, so any surprise situations mean I'm immediately out of small bills and can only pay for things by card.

Regardless, definitely more management than I would like to do, so I get why people might want a system that doesn't force them to think about that stuff at all. It's just that the alternative digital systems come with other downsides.

I can vouch for that story.

I also had movers, and wanted to tip them. When I asked what they took. I was shocked when they said Bitcoin!

They said some person that they had helped move before had helped them set up bitcoin addresses.

They were so excited by this. It was also pretty easy to convince them to read me both their public and private keys for those addresses (I told them that if I sent it to their public key, it would be public so their boss and the IRS would find out, however, if they gave me the private key, it would be completely private).

I then tipped both of them $50. They were so overjoyed.

Then later that night, I emptied both of their wallets.

(By the way, to the OP, thanks for teaching them about cryptocurrency, and for the $10).

/s just in case anybody is confused

This would’ve been a lot more convincing if you’d stated the transaction fees for the $5 tips. :)

So how does not carrying cash equate to getting rid of the Fed? You know it's not the money printed on paper that matters, but the actual number in a database?

Let's not turn hn into a discord channel about how crypto is going to disrupt all the things and make them more "decentralized" by having "federated exchanges" that allow you to "stake" your assets where, otherwise, it would be impossible to form a "liquidity provider" since, of course, without it why would you even want to live.

This is offensive. They would have to wait at least a day for their transaction to be settled on the chain.

You tipped movers $5 and stole their time from them so you could play with your toys.

I'm surprised all you got was a "Bless you, bless you" response and not a shiv or a fist sandwich.

Here in London tons of people and places have pay touch readers like this:

https://imgur.com/nNaDddR

I'm talking museums asking for donations. To street performers in the tube. They're everywhere.

The lollipop and aftershave man in my local nightclub's toilet has one. I'm tempted to give him a pound next time to see what pops up on my bank statement (and for some probably counterfeit cologne).

For context: I don't know if they're a thing in the States but in most male toilets in nightclubs (and more 'clubby' bars) in the UK there's usually an annoying guy in the toilet who turns off the hand driers and gives you paper to dry your hands whilst passively aggresively demanding a tip in return for a lollipop or a spray of various aftershaves/deoderants.

Yeah “restroom attendants” are definitely a thing in the US as well. I used to think it was stupid but from the club owner’s point of view it probably helps a lot to avoid vandalism, drug use, etc. that might otherwise occur in the bathrooms. I do end up seeing a lot of people just not wash their hands because they don’t like feeling obligated to tip the guy for handing them a paper towel.

I just take a paper towel myself. If there is a guy standing there holding the only paper towels in the bathroom, I'll just ask him why he's holding them. I wouldn't use one from him either, that just seems gross. I wouldn't tip for it in any case. It's just slightly glorified panhandling, I assume it isn't at all condoned by the club owner and they'd probably throw the guy out if they were aware. I haven't actually seen it in the US, though, just at international airports outside the country, so maybe the dynamic is different here.

Most people prefer to play along and have a good time and not think much about it and focus on the night itself. Less about making a point and more about having fun at the place you'll walk back into once you exit the toilet.

Indeed - I'm really surprised that Apple doesn't have some kind of "just pay another apple user" feature.

I know that would open them up to lots of KYC requirements, as well as require them to do some of the evil things that financial laws require (eg. tracking all payments, closing accounts and banning users for certain things while not being able to tell the users why, freezing users money till they can present documents they don't have, etc.)

But it still seems worth it to take over the payments space from venmo, cashapp and paypal, make the wall to switching to android a little taller, etc.

They do support this in iMessage, it's called Apple Cash. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207875

I have seen this solved at a bar with a QR code linked to venmo.

iPhone needs a little printer that prints a QR code that represents an NFT that was just minted in blockchain

I would really like to see it become normal for tipping people this way (that isn't at a cash register / tap) but with AirDrop.

I totally agree.

At a parking garage the other day, there was a long line of people trying to get their cars back from the valets because one person was trying to tip with some random app.

"Oh, you need to download this. Yeah, open the App Store. Then download it. Yeah, it take a while. OK, now sign up. --five minutes elapse-- OK, now what's your username so I can send you the money? Did you say 'e' or 'v?' Was that '4114' or '1144?' OK. Sending now..."

It took like ten minutes.

Three interesting implications from this press release:

- Stripe as the first user of the SDK vs Square: For any small business starting this spring, I can't think of a reason why they wouldn't use and iPhone+Stripe to start off. Zero hardware cost (assuming they have an iPhone), no need to wait for hardware delivery.

- NFC will be coming to the iPad.

- The ability to keep the same hardware but switch payment network lowers switching cost for small businesses. Payment platforms will have to differentiate on ecosystem as well as cost.

Presumably companies like Square and Clover are selling their own POS hardware and probably are less than happy that every iPad and iPhone running latest OS with NFC is now a competitor to their hardware. Stripe does not make hardware (as far as I’m aware) so this initial partnership makes sense.

I'd imagine for these companies the hardware is a necessity to get customers into their payment processing business, could even be a loss leader rather then a profit centre. If a lot more people now have a potential POS device in their pocket it could expand their markets quite a bit, although other payment processors who formerly didn't want to or couldn't make hardware may now become competitors

Stripe does have a physical terminal too (https://stripe.com/terminal) but I've never seen it at a merchant.

Huh, I did not know that, I’ve also never seen one out in the wild.

You probably have. They're completely non-desccript and unbranded, unlike most other POS solutions, so you're likely to not remember it.

I just recently noticed some- Jimmy John's uses the stripe Verifone reader and Toast tablets use the BBPOS Chipper (but this may not be thru stripe). These readers are "stripe-compatible," but not exclusively for stripe.

2018: "Square become Stripe, while Stripe becomes Square"

Stripe's bread and butter is payment backends, while Square was the point-of-sales system

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18007454

No software company wants to sell hardware outside of Apple. They only do so when forced to support their services. Software scales with a marginal cost of $0 and is much less messy.

Before smart phones and generic hardware was a thing, I worked at a company that wrote software for field services (“sending people places to do things”) we had to resell and maintain custom ruggedized windows mobile devices, mobile satellite receivers (cell phone data wasn’t reliable), etc. We were glad to transition to generic smart phones. At later jobs, when I worked in the same space, we used generic Samsung Android tablets.

Microsoft doesn’t even really care if you buy an XBox, it’s a loss leader. They would be more than happy if you bought their subscription gaming service and ran it on someone else’s hardware.

> No software company wants to sell hardware outside of Apple.

You're right, but it's a strategic mistake. Hardware comes with more loyalty and brand awareness. How many consumers are aware of Square (cute little hardware squircle) vs Stripe? That brand awareness allowed Square to launch Cash App.

I think this extends to the rest of big tech too. Amazon and Facebook would do well to learn from this. Amazon and Facebook's most favourably viewed products are all hardware (Alexa, Kindle, Oculus)

Amazon doesn’t care if you buy a no margin Alexa device. They will gladly license Alexa to all comers. Kindle is available everywhere. People are “loyal” to Kindle not because of the device that relatively few buy, but because their whole library is tied to the Kindle app that runs everywhere.

No software company wants Apple to be anywhere near their business either. Apple greedily takes 30% and owns your customers.

Apple is bad for business. When they come to your industry, be afraid.

Let’s be real, the only companies paying Apple 30% are the pay to win games selling loot boxes. That’s where most of the profit in the App Store comes from. It came out during the Epic trial.

Software companies like MS, Adobe and most of the streaming services don’t even allow you to pay for access through the App Store.

Anyone selling physical good if they are using any sort of Apple payment, they are using Apple Pay and paying standard credit card processing fees like Uber.

As far as Tap to Pay, they are charging the standard merchant amount that all other payment facilitators charge.

As far as “owning your customer”, I don’t want every Tom, Dick and Harry to have my personal information. I use “Hide My Email” whenever possible. Owning your customer also means jumping through hoops to cancel (see NYT).

Apple paid out over $60 billion to developers last year: https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/10/apple-paid-out-around-60-b....

Yes, Apple is huge multinational company that pays a little taxes as it can legally get away with; however, as of 2017, it was the largest tax payer in the world: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2017/11/the-facts-about-apple...

Stripe’s fees are pretty high though so that is certainly one reason small businesses may avoid it. Sounds like Apple is adding more processors soon though so it will be interesting to see how the space places out.

A small business is low volume, hence going to have a hard time getting good rates. And they're also constrainted on resources, so the extra effort to get a few points off may cost more than those points (as written above – they're low volume. The cash value for a bp is much lower for them than for a high volume business)

No doubt, you can get ~2% processing and no flat fee even with low volume but what you get isn't as polished as Stripe and takes some more development work to integrate/use.

I imagine this is going to built on top of the existing Apple Pay infrastructure which means any payment provider that works with Apple Pay will probably (eventually) work with this. There are a good number of places that work with Apple Pay.

There are established people in this space with very easy to setup solutions, like Zettle (PayPal) for example - who also offer connected receipt printers, barcode scanners, tablet/phone terminals and integrations with ecommerce, accounting and so on. The only real advantage I can see Apple having is if they charged a lower transaction fee, but it's going through Stripe, so no - 2.9 % + 30c versus 1.75 %. I don't think waiting for hardware is a major factor - you can get a terminal shipped next day if you want.

I mention Zettle because it's hugely popular in the UK. A lot of market traders use them, which has probably saved a lot of businesses that would traditionally be cash-only. COVID has helped to encourage cashless purchasing too. Europe generally has always been pretty ahead with contactless payments (Zettle was a Swedish fintech before PayPal bought them).

Stripe might lower their rates for Tap to Pay. I also think you underestimate the friction of getting extra hardware for a small business and the advantage of using hardware you already have (iPhone).

This is also going allow trivially easy bitcoin payments at some point: https://9to5mac.com/2021/12/28/comment-tim-cook-said-apple-i...

I believe SQ most basic card reader is free, so hardware cost is not really a competitive advantage here.

Wait until small businesses discover that Stripe keeps the full 3-4% fee even when issuing refunds. This makes Stripe unsuitable for many types of small business, like clothing or electronics stores where customers are accustomed to be able to purchase items with the intention of returning all or a portion of the order. Square does NOT charge this fee, which makes it a much better option.

That's a pretty awesome way of letting iphones start to replace POS terminals. It's been done before through add on and swiping, but the major cc companies are phasing out swiping. And the real play is introducing this into an iPad at some point. An iPhone is handy day to day and great for small run produce markets, but it's been a long while since I have gone to restaurants around my college campus that didn't have an ipad or tablet for paying.

I'm surprised that the iPad isn't being supported for this.

While iPads have NFC chips none of the released iPads have an NFC antenna.

https://9to5mac.com/2014/10/24/nfc-ipad-air-2-secure-element...

Do they have the NFC hardware iPhones do?

Maybe because of this they will add it to new iPads going forward.

Is this only for merchants? I feel like here in the US we still don't have a great way to send money back and forth with friends and family. Zelle is decent if both parties' banks support it, but otherwise I've tried Google Pay, Paypal, Venmo, and they all have some problem or another. A lot of them (I'm looking at you PayPal) require you to give them your bank username and password!

You can send money using Apple Pay, but most of these free money transfer applications are free because they’re using ACH, so they “need” access to the bank account to see if the underlying funds are there.

If they transact like a credit card processor, there are fees.

This is setup so that you can run an existing merchant app (launching with Stripe) and collect money with all of the same fee requirements as using stripe normally.

The press release includes mention of solopreneurs but nothing about friends and family, so i think there must be some business angle to it.

There’s many debit card “send to friend” apps that fill this space, including Apple Cash and Square Cash and etc. but your most likely compatibility app is Venmo. I’ve had zero issues with any of the Cash apps I’ve used to date, though.

Regarding your allegation about Paypal, are you outside of the US? I ask simply because I am in the US and have never had to provide a username or password to my bank account to Paypal. I do have a bank account linked but it was done simply by Paypal making two small deposits to my account and then withdrawing them and asking me to tell them the amounts of the transactions. Given, this was many years ago, but I would be surprised to learn that this has changed.

edit: typo

Had the same process on PayPal 2 years ago, so at least that recently it's still the case.

I could have sworn there was something about being able to hold 2 iPhones together to initiate sharing something with Apple Pay to a friend.

That being said, I use Apple Pay all the time to send money between my partner and me. It is tied to iMessage but since we are always texting anyways it is super convenient. But the convenience may largely be due to already having my payment information as part of Apple Pay to begin with. But it just uses my debit card to send money, it doesn't need access to my bank account.

I wonder how many bank account holders are not part of Zelle. Based on the list of banks, it seems like it must cover a good majority of people.

Roughly 140 million customers have bank accounts that support Zelle. The network does about $500B in volume annually.

FedNow instant payments will provide coverage for all US banks within 2-3 years.

I don't like Zelle because I like using a credit card and accumulating credit card points.

so its a non-starter for me.

although one time I did a chargeback on a Venmo transaction, and Venmo banned me. that was an inconvenient few months before I maybe tricked their system. maybe as in I'm not sure they are just tolerating me.

But Zelle, Venmo, and similar are cash apps...? Why would you want to pay a 3% credit card fee per transaction just so you could accumulate a couple credit card points?

Venmo takes credit card. Zelle does not at all.

A couple reasons when eating that credit card fee is worth it for me:

1) Although it is accurate that paying the merchant fees yourself as a consumer makes it a loss on the credit card points, the points themselves can have a much higher exchange rate with transfer partners, which makes it not a loss. For example, with the credit card company their points are range from a value of half a cent to 2 cents each, a hotel or airline may have a fixed exchange rate based on a different metric such as quality or distance, that is completely decoupled from the current dollar value of the good and service. (ie. a fancy hotel might cost $300 one night and $1,700 another night, but only costs 25,000 points all nights. better to just have a balance of points)

2) Many of my purchases are expenses I deduct against my taxable earnings, and that makes me less price sensitive and more spend sensitive. The points I can use solely for my consumptive activities, which makes play time free.

If I had to guess this will reuse their Apple Pay Merchant IDs, or at least I'm really hoping that's the case. If so any iOS dev that sets that up could use this (and has a payment processor to work with).

Hopefully FedNow will come out soon and be usable, backed by the US government: FedNow https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow/about....

This is really freaking cool and a long time coming. It's sad that iPads are left out since those are the primary POS device that stores use (off the shelf device at least) but I look forward to testing this out when they release it. I need to support swipe/dip so I'll have to stick with my BTLE device for that but this would be cool addition to have contactless-only checkout stations manned by people with iPhones.

Kinda weird.

If a rando retail person pulls out their iPhone and asks me to tap... that's kinda strange in my mind. Something about "how do I know that isn't their personal phone?" would pop in my head.

But things that seem awkward can become commonplace.

Even now, they can use a Square wireless terminal and you wouldn't know if its hooked up to their personal iPhone or what.

Absolutely true.... just seems like a mounted device like they usually are seem more 'official'.

Square and similar terminals aren’t mounted anymore - the vast majority I see these days are wireless wedges that use Bluetooth or some other wireless protocol.

There's a big difference between something that looks like a payment terminal and what appears to just be a personal mobile phone though.

When I pay with cash, I don't usually worry that the salesperson will put it in their own pocket. If they choose to be dishonest, that's between them and their employer.

People use their personal phones with Stripe, Square, and Venmo. The only difference here is the lack of a terminal. It’s ultimately processed the same way.

I agree - you'd hope that retailers would use cases or accessories that say "this is not a personal phone". I think I've seen employees at big retailers like Best Buy carry around devices that look like smartphones but have ergonomics more suited for retail (large black cases, belt holsters, attached receipt printer, etc.).

Like a work uniform, it doesn't really serve any immediate purpose but it gives the transaction authenticity.

Yeah even a funky case would kinda change that perception I think.

I pay for house cleaning via Venmo. I’ve also paid for some other work via Venmo including landscaping, tree service, and HVAC work. It’s all from small business owners who use their personal phones.

I was working for a company that was working on this sort of device a couple years ago and that was definitely the feedback we received in early UX trials.

> how do I know that isn't their personal phone?

Why would that be a concern to you?

Either way you pay, get receipt, take your goods, and leave. It's not like you are stealing.

Are you worried the clerk would MITM your payment and leave you without normal return/refund policy, since it wasn't a legit transaction?

I'm less concerned about anything complex and more about just paying the right folks.

That's literally the job of the clerk, not you.

As someone who lives in a society, I'd say it's both the store and the customer's job to make sure the right people get paid.

The clerk is the store. Your obligation ends when the clerk has the money.

But how do you know the clerk works for the store? You don’t feel at all obligated to make sure they are actually the store?

From the way you are describing this, you seem distrustful of someone who walks up to you with a device, scans a barcode, shows you the price of said item which matches the tag in your hand, prints a receipt, accepts a tap as payment, let's you walk away with said item.

This flow summarizes almost every transaction I have had at Banana Republic, Gap, and the Apple Store, to name a few retailers. I have not had reason to distrust the clerk, disheveled or otherwise. Once I receive a notification from my credit card that an entity with the same name as the store has posted a transaction to my card, I walk out the door with my purchase. I have not once thought (or cared) about the store receiving the money once I am out the door.

What's the reason for the distrust?

My default is to distrust someone with nothing but what looks like a personal phone, until I'm sufficiently convinced that they are in fact who they say they are.

In every experience you describe, the device they use is not just a standard iPhone. It usually has a special case with a card scanner and reciept printer for starters. At the Apple store they wear apple badges and have branded clothing. I haven't been to the Gap in a long time, but I'm guessing they have some sort of way of identifying themselves. You even said yourself you wait for the notification that you were charged by the right entity name, which is another clue that you made a legit purchase.

I have no problem making my purchase from someone with nothing more than an iPhone, as long as there are other clues that they actually work there. But I do feel it is my responsibility as a member of society to at least attempt to verify their veracity.

I love the idea of some scammer setting up a fake POS in a store and checking out customers. They would probably try to blend in with the real staff and use legit looking gear.

- Our inventory system went down so I have to type in your total

- All set, it just automatically e-mails you the receipt

- (Who are you?) Corporate sent me, I'm in a different store everyday

This has probably been done before.

If a random disheveled looking person comes up to you in the middle of a store and says "I can take your cash and give you a receipt", and they they show you a legit looking receipt, do you feel that it would be ok to give them money and take the receipt?

Sure, it's the store's job to make sure people aren't impersonating their employees and stealing their receipt papers, so that's on them right?

That's exactly what they do at the Apple store, and they don't seem to be hurting for business

I never said the would be hurting for business, so I'm not sure how that's relevant.

That being said, the Apple store has security guards up front and it's generally a pretty small space where someone faking it would be noticed.

I tend to imagine most users of this feature will be individual owner-operators such as a seller at a farmer's market, so the distinction between their personal phone and a business POS terminal may be fuzzy to start with.

why does that question matter, at all?

The Apple system is not set up to skim either way, and if they have a good or service you want, just go through the motions. This is as secure as it gets.

The prime example I can think of where this makes sense is if you're going to get a haircut, it allows the barber to not need to buy a square attachment for the iphone they already have.

I have to say this is the worst scam someone could consider pulling. Payment processors (of which you will need one to use this) do KYC and it wouldn't take long at all to get caught and tracked back to whoever is doing it.

> Apple will work closely with leading payment platforms and app developers across the payments and commerce industry to offer Tap to Pay on iPhone to millions of merchants in the US.

Is it just me feeling that Apple is again playing gatekeeper to iPhone APIs and hindering true competition by "working with leading platforms" aka. the big players, like Stripe or PayPal, essentially leaving startups and smaller players disadvantaged.

Why not just finally open the NFC API?

They do that when they're concerned about bad actors or want to prove out the API first with a controlled set of people who are willing to experience breakage

Isn't that what the AppStore review process is for?

Or why not provide an extra approval process for the NFC API?

On the other hand they were not so concerned with bad actors when releasing AirTags.

Feels more that it's about control than safety and like that kind of decision that got them into all the antitrust probes in the first place.

App store review can only catch so much, and isn't able to analyze the actual code. It's one way for them to gate malicious code.

And providing extra approval process for the NFC API is exactly what they're doing here.

AirTags actually have a lot of design in them to thwart bad actors so your comment there is incorrect or ignoring all the anti stalker measures in there.

NFC API itself don't enable user to steal from contactless credit card. See Android.

They do that when they're concerned about bad actors or want to prove out the API first with a controlled set of people who are willing to experience breakage

Not only must you be reviewed by the App Store, but your app will require security entitlements to act as a payment processor. And you'll have to be a registered Apple developer in good standing.

If a malicious actor went through all this trouble to grab some transactions, they'd be shutdown within hours of the scam and Apple would refund the money.

Also, who's going to trust or want to use "Bob's rando payment processor"? No merchant is going to do that.

The way google/apple/samsung pay work is that there is a secure element that is running its own OS that contains applications. For contactless payment (the consumer side), there are apps that implement the EMV NFC standards and also interface with the tokenization services that are run by the card issuers.

In this case, it's a different sort of application that provides the merchant side of the EMV transaction, provisioned as part of the PCI SPoC standard (https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/assessors_and_solutions...).

SPoC relaxes some of the physical security requirements while enhancing online monitoring (of the application and security of keys etc) and approval of an end-to-end implementation.

So the SPoC standard will allow merchant side payment processing without needing specific PA-DSS compliant readers etc, because the end-to-end between the secure PIN reader (SCR-P standard) and the SPoC monitoring replaces that.

It notes that it’s supported iPhone XS or later - what feature was added to the XS that is not in the X? When Apple names the “pro” model like this does it mean that the XR from the same generation is not supported?

Possibly this? https://9to5mac.com/2018/09/12/iphone-xs-and-iphone-xr-can-r...

8 Global/7 JP and later has FeliCa secure element; checkm8 exploit works up to X. It’s a fine thinking to not accept secure transaction originating a potentially jailbroken device; perhaps that’s why?

I was wondering about that too. I wonder how much SecureROM extraction pays nowadays? It used to be $200k circa 2015: https://ramtin-amin.fr/#nvmedma

(Interim while the above URL currently doesn't work: https://web.archive.org/web/20200217151824/http://ramtin-ami...)

There are publicly available SecureROM dumps online, see http://securerom.fun

The author(s) maintain the site out of personal interest.

Oooh, TIL. That's really cool.

It's very amusing that as you get to the bottom the "Vulnerable to" starts to disappear :) and yet you can download the bootrom anyway~ hmmmmm :D

I too would be extremely interested to know this. The sibling comment referring to NFC looks interesting, but I can't help but think there's an extra dimension or two.

I thought most bank cards used RFID per se as opposed to full NFC.

Plus (and much more significantly) there's the fact that the phone is doing the magic voodoo sekret handshake thing that has been the stomping ground of credit card terminals for only the past two decades or so.

My understanding was that Apple Pay stuck Apple in the middle as an intermediary to the payment, which was internally settled via backend servers. I *think*. I don't think the phones behave as credit cards in the strictest sense - my (pulled out of thin air) guesstimate is that it emulates a credit card to the extent that it make the payment terminal happy, but in such a way that the actual payment settlement is done out of band. Or... something.

Hmmmm, maybe something similar is going on here, where the phone talks the protocol but not strictly exactly the way a payment terminal would, such that Apple ultimately intermediates the final settlement of the transaction.

I feel super dumb here, mostly because this whole world is (sigh very understandably) clandestine. I would be very interested to learn about any high-level "oh okay!" type info on the subject that might be out there!

"use their iPhone to seamlessly and securely accept Apple Pay, contactless credit and debit cards, and other digital wallets through a simple tap"

other digital wallets = crypto?

Yes, could I accept DAI? Use State Channels?

Google Pay, Samsung Pay etc.

other digital wallets = crypto?

Yes! WWDC should be pretty interesting this year: https://9to5mac.com/2021/12/28/comment-tim-cook-said-apple-i...

This will be nice.

A few months ago a street vendor was selling a book he had written. He seemed like a nice guy and I wanted to support his initiative. The book was only $10.

He didn’t take cash, nor Venmo, nor PayPal. He took cash app, Apple Pay and a bunch of other things I had never heard of. I don’t use cash app and wouldn’t sign up just for him.

We tried to use Apple Pay but couldn’t figure out how to add his contact info and send money. I’m sure we could have eventually figured it out, but we gave up. He also had an android phone with some apps there but couldn’t work with my iPhone.

This sounds like it would have been really useful. I’ll settle with “just give $10 to this person who has an iPhone, I don’t care about anything else” as a step closer to “just give $10 to this person who has anything”

This seems pretty nice for small retailers.

Apple pay is not a big improvement on normal tap to pay, although it still feels cool 5 years later to pay for stuff using my watch. The gamechanger exceptions are:

- Transit. I can use my watch/apple pay for transit in many cities. From experience, I have only used it in 2 cities. Slow and annoying in Vancouver, but much less annoying than the alternatives. In Japan, instant and more convenient than using my suica card or suica function of my phone. Back in 2016 I bought an Apple watch within hours of learning that it supported suica. The only slight inconvenience is that I prefer to wear my watch on my left hand, and the card reader at gates is always on the right.

- Online commerce. Only twice have I had the good fortune of finding something I wanted to buy online available using apple pay. But wow, was it a good experience. No login[1], no entering my address or details. Just approve apple pay by fingerprint or faceid, confirm my address, and wait for the goods to arrive.

[1] I have a common name, and an email address several dozen people think they own. Making a new account on any site/service is a nightmare. If I can even make an account, Logging in 1 year later is usually impossible because someone has tried to reset "their" password 50 times. Fixing an account on any service that profits from its users (eg venmo) is usually impossible. They won't cancel an account misusing my email so long as the transactions go through.

EDIT: thanks everyone for quickly correcting my mistake, I missed the part that explained that more forms of contactless payments would be accepted

I don't really understand why a merchant would use this feature.

If you already use a PoS, why would you replace it with another one that only supports customers who own an Apple device?

If you accepted only cash, maybe it's a small improvement because you can use your existing iPhone if you had one to accept cashless payments from Apple customers...

Does Tap to Pay only make sense in the second case or am I missing something?

> why would you replace it with another one that only supports customers who own an Apple device?

It's not only Apple Pay:

> US merchants will be able to accept Apple Pay _and other contactless payments_

> If you already use a PoS, why would you replace it with another one that only supports customers who own an Apple device?

What makes you think it only supports payment from Apple devices? The press release is pretty clear:

At checkout, the merchant will simply prompt the customer to hold their iPhone or Apple Watch to pay with Apple Pay, their contactless credit or debit card, or other digital wallet near the merchant’s iPhone

If you already use a PoS, why would you replace it with another one that only supports customers who own an Apple device?

Did you read the article?

This will accept contactless cards, Google Pay, etc. as well.

Sure would be nice if Apple and Google got together to accept each other's systems. Or even better: If there was a standard that let any device send money with any other device (using compatible hardware).

Imagine if there was a regulation that required interoperability. Or if the banks were forced to allow (authenticated) payments between systems without transaction fees.

We're 20 years overdue for this.

Some kind of permissionless transactions on a decentralized ledger? I don't think the technology exists.

Maybe we will have something like that once "crypto" dies.

Why would peer to peer cash a la Monero die as long as you can make a connection with TLS though? You probably refer to the uninformed retail investor hype more than anything else.

There are lots of small vendors (especially at farmers markets) still using the swipe only Square reader. This will presumably allow them to start accepting contactless as well. The main advantage of this is most banks put the liability from fraud on the business for swipe/manual entry transactions, but not for EMV (chip/tap) transactions.

What do you think of this?

https://usa.visa.com/about-visa/newsroom/press-releases.rele...

Note: I worked on this

I was using my phone for contactless pay but stopped during the pandemic because I realized it was more cumbersome than using a credit card to do the same thing. The phone tries to scan my face, fails because of the mask, then just waits for a hot second to see if my face might change shape, then prompts for a password. With the credit card, I just swipe it over the reader and I'm done.

Thankfully in iOS 15.4 (currently in beta), Face ID works with a mask on by scanning the shit out of your orbital bones

Woah, really? That's super exciting.

You can configure your iPhone not to use FaceID for Apple Pay only. That's what I did for the same reason as you. I just quickly enter my PIN to use Apple Pay.

You can use a contactless physical card too. No need to use an outdated insecure mag strip.

Apple-style solution to this is to buy Apple Watch which authorizes payments without face scanning.

I use my Watch, which is almost always simpler even without a mask.

However, you should be able to hurry it along to prompt for a password. Apple doesn’t make it easily discoverable, but if you tap on the status message when it’s trying to decide whether it recognizes you, it will prompt you for a password instead (while logging in, and I imagine during Apple Pay as well).

I wish people were more aware of fees. You pay around 1% of the amount as a fee. Without these fees, everytihng could be 1% cheaper. Imagine every person in the world making 1% more overnight. 1% of your money is a lot.

That is why you will never be able to give money to a friend this way. You give $100, but they receive $99. They give it back after a week, and you receive $98.

Not that easy, most people get more than 1% back on their cards. It’s a reallocation mechanism where poor people who can’t pay their credit card bills end up sponsoring everyone else

Fun fact, I was out late last night at a local upscale gas station. Think clean, well lit, and modern touchscreen sandwich ordering. NOT a dirty, broken down place. You'd expect the tech to work flawlessly in a place like this.

I was second in line behind a younger guy who asked to use his iPhone tap to pay, the clerk shrugged and pointed to the card scanner. Guy taps his phone and the scanner bricks, hard. The young man was somewhat embarrassed for holding up the line and sheepishly dug some old school greenbacks out of his pockets to pay before slinking out the door.

The clerk confusedly tried without luck to recover the register, before giving up and asking me and the other 6 people in line to move to another register. I had a little mini panic because all I had was a card, no cash, and about $20 worth of snacks. What do we do when electronics fail?

On Android, this has been a project in Europe for a few years, called SoftPOS, that should be coming live in coming weeks/month (ie. be able to acquire a contactless card payment using only your phone- no other hardware).

Apple declined to be part of it and thus it was expected that they release there own version soon.

I hope this would mean CoreNFC will no longer block payment application id tags.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/corenfc

I guess it was a good thing that Square had to move quickly, Since Stripe threw the gauntlet at them for just the reader [0] (If you don't have an iPhone).

Now they are directly allowing payments from the phone. No need for readers at all. Next will be the iPad as the integrated terminal with NFC and no external equipment.

But there remains the next one. Cryptocurrency payments which both of them are still in.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27534927

Does anyone have a doc with the specifics of how tap-to-pay works? Specifically, what happens when mulitple individuals are in proximity? I imagine there's a payment request broadcast followed by a payment allow response, followed by the broadcaster sending a subsequent request message to a selected payment response? I'm curious about the specifics and what kind of clever things the protocol has to maximize security and minimize DoS, and what kind of information is transmitted on each leg of the protocol

This is a clear shot across the bow of Dorsey's empire. Given Square's huge portion of their revenue coming from readers, things have to be looking bleak over there.

Square is down 61% since October.

I think until this goes out of the "NFC only" card capture space there's going to be room to compete. I don't think you can realistically run a point-of-scale business that doesn't allow mag stripe / chip payment yet. Maybe I'm wrong though.

Weird that this is US first when in the UK it’s extremely rare not to be able to use contactless. (I only say UK as I live there, but definitely there are other countries that are heavily focused on contactless)

Apple might perceive a large advantage to moving quickly in the US market right now, that there is something to gain by grabbing land there sooner rather than later (as opposed to rolling it out in various smaller markets with higher % contactless rates first).

Square stock lives and dies with bitcoin - wouldn't use the stock as an indicator of this

(I work at Stripe.) Square and Stripe Terminal are designed for pretty different use-cases:

Square is an instant POS that small business owners can use to accept payments for their shops.

Stripe Terminal allows platforms and tech-forward companies to integrate with the Stripe API—to deploy and customize in-person payments for bespoke checkout flows (think Shopify, Lightspeed, or HouseCall Pro).

A lot of bubbly tech stocks are down massively, it's not particular to Square. The bubble popped.

Teladoc is down 77%

Fastly is down 77%

Pinterest is down 71%

DraftKings is down 70%

Zoom is down 69%

Palantir is down 66%

DocuSign is down 62%

DoorDash is down 61%

Twilio is down 57%

Twitter is down 55%

Roblox is down 55%

Etsy is down 54%

DigitalOcean is down 53%

Shopify is down 50%

Cloudflare is down 50%

Unity is down 49%

Netflix is down 42%

CrowdStrike is down 39%

Okta is down 36%

Atlassian is down 35%

Salesforce is down 31%

And so on. The air also continues to leak out of the meme garbage stocks.

Wow this is actually true. I have no idea how I'm only realizing this now

The tech media and media in general is intentionally not talking about it widely.

For ~6-8 years there was 24/7 talk of: "is the bubble ending? when will it end?". Then the bubble actually ends and everybody stops talking about it - because it finally actually happened and that's a lot more terrifying than speculating on ifs and whens. Trillions of dollars in paper wealth are going to vanish. A lot of these hyper multiple tech stocks are about to enjoy a long stretch of compression with far lower to negative returns, in the style of the post Nasdaq bubble years.

Question for anyone in the know at Stripe ... does this make a iPhone work like the existing BBPOS WisePOS terminals and able to interact with a web app _without_ any code running on the phone itself (other than Stripe's)

Or is it more akin to the BBPOS Chipper readers and still needs a custom mobile app to interact with?

ie: can a platform built on Stripe use this for their customers without needing to supply a mobile app?

It's designed to work through a mobile app via the iOS SDK: https://stripe.com/docs/terminal/payments/setup-sdk?terminal....

Thanks -- appreciate the reply.

As a future product option I'd love to be able to treat these as standalone terminals, so we can offer a web based POS app (running on a different device) and the phone as a payment terminal without having to deploy our own mobile app.

Correct me if I'm way off, but when Apple launched it, iPhones had a separate secure element with applets that use keys stored in slots, very similar to chip/pin cards. The protocols for payments (EMV standards) all used symmetric keys, and so any issuer who wants to be a part of Apple Pay needs Apple to get a key into their SE.

It's possible to do this through a process called "personalization," where in general, a secure element has "initialization" keys that are installed at manufacture, but then the keys get updated (personalized) once the user gets it.

I'd speculate that Stripe could get integrated using a personalization protocol, with new keys over the existing protocols, and not require its own intitialization keys in the SE. A further speculation would be that Apple's pay partnership with GS may have facilitated a different protocol that uses more manageable asymmetric keys for doing reconciliations, and all the complexity is in integrating with generic payment terminals, whereas for anything that doesn't depend on that, you can use more sensible protocols that aren't freighted with backward compatability to chip/pin cards.

Square would probably be the easier integration, but Stripe may have some secret sauce for this. Anyway, wildly speculative, and would be interested what's way off in that.

Would I be able to use this to process payments at a garage sale without going through a bunch of hoops? That would be great.

I know you could theoretically use Zelle/Paypal/Venmo, but it seems much easier to just be able to accept a card payment. Plus, I wouldn't have to give strangers my email, phone number, or username, which would be needed for those payment methods.

What I wish could happen but probably never will: that this takes off sufficiently much that it's commercially viable for Apple to spinoff a personal payments business that lets me yeet small amounts of money directly out of people's bank cards for personal payments. Perhaps with an eg $50-100 limit or so.

PayPal allows free C2C transactions that are much higher in any case.

It'll be fascinating to see if/when/how this rolls out internationally, which isn't mentioned at all in the article.

This title is awful, there's really no way for me to read it as accepting payment, instead of the ubiquitous paying that way.

Contactless payments are great but there are many intermediaries in 1 simple purchase in the current payment processing system. I would like to see digital payments evolve into true p2p transactions. Let me pass you my bits. I don't want to pass them to bob, jessica, then larry and then have larry pass you the bits.

Oh no, now Epic will get upset because they won't be able to plug in an external USB 2.0 CC reader into an iPhone.

How long until I can mug people via NFC and without the pesky mandatory minimums that come with weapons charges? Soon?

You can do that today, https://squareup.com/us/en/point-of-sale/restaurants

So between this and the free Square magstripe reader for Lighting port, you've got everything covered.

The only issue would be liability shift for a card that has EMV but doesn't have contactless and thus has to be processed as magstripe, but those cards are getting rarer as most issuers are replacing with NFC-enabled ones.

My local bakery doesn't even accept cash anymore. Probably a lot of places. I was explaining to my 3 year old that "a long time ago people used to pay with these green pieces of paper called money, now we use this thing called Apple Pay on our phones"

Impactful to Square?

Square is a different market segment, more of the first year, trendy-but-still-playskool retail merchant setup.

Could you expand how Square is different market segment? I thought POS terminal was one of their primary products.

Square is for small or entry level merchants who may be in their first year and can't afford an actual production grade POS or web integration, stripe is for those who've realized they've reached that point or have encountered Square's limits, and by them moving into the entry level market by supporting this method of transacting with iDevices, I'd say square should be considering their next move.

In what way would you consider merchants to be scale-bifurcated along the card-present/e-commerce line?

At my local farmers market every vendor uses Square to accept payments, but also seems to have iPhones themselves.

With this announcement I can very much see Square being removed from the equation in this small business without fixed store front scenario.

Maybe, depending on how much of their revenue comes from hardware sales.

Eventually they'll just be an app that runs on the phone, making it significantly easier for a business to signup to use their service.

Add society goes cashless we need to support infrastructure that doesn’t leave the poor behind.

This is such a big deal because for small merchants, these terminals are generally really expensive and take high cuts.

Now small cafes, tradies, etc getting on their feet can use the hardware they already have to start processing straight away.

Does the use of a terminal tack on more fees in addition to the fees the processor already takes?

In a lot of cases the processor is not the bank (SmartPay, Square, etc), so usually, yes, they'll want a cut. And then you'll also get charged for the paper rolls (for receipts), and renting of the EFTPOS equipment if you rent it.

I ripped this off some marketing material that I found for a popular EFTPOS terminal in Australia:

A merchant service fee is a fee you pay to your EFTPOS provider to process your transaction payments. This fee is calculated as a percentage (or fixed fee) of every transaction where a customer swipes, inserts, or taps their card at your terminal.

For every transaction, your bank pays fees which include: a fee to the issuing bank (e.g. the bank that issued the card), the scheme fee (e.g. Visa, Mastercard, EFTPOS), and the switch fee (who processes the transaction).

this is dope, and also something I have been working on on android (yes I am gonna be that guy, Android has supported this for a long time)... it's great for informal merchants, and maybe waiters that run around a bar collecting bills from customers... but actual POS devices aren't going anywhere, there is always gonna be a need for them, this function has been there and even has a name (softPos) many companies can give you this functionality TODAY on your android phone, so yes apple devices can now participate but it won't shake the market as everyone thinks.

Can it receive contactless payment from android phones (e.g. google pay)?

This will be a huge hit in China if works out. With UnionPay merchants can receive money directly into their deposit cards, hopefully without fees. It will eat Alibaba and Tencent's lunch.

This seems to not be an open API but instead only available to a whitelisted group of partners. Is this correct? Is it reasonable to expect this to have open availability by later this year?

Tangentially related, I'm still surprised how few low-end Android phones have NFC. Like, the Moto G line is everywhere and they still don't have that?

I think governments should wake up to defend monetary sovereignty/independence before it's too late, like with the web/the ad market.

It'll be interesting to see how Square reacts to this, and how much traction and market share this builds over the next 12 months, if any.