Apple pay when available is about as low friction as you can get. I know it isnt available to everyone but there should be some similar standard that is. Near seamless.
That being said, I feel the parent’s viewpoint is naively idealistic, the payment industry is huge with many players and most attempts at new standards or interoperability are by people trying to get a cut of the action, no one is going to adopt a new standard unless they feel they absolutely have to.
ApplePay is pragmatic in that it largely hooks into the existing CC systems and thanks to Apple’s market size they have enough clout to convince people it’s worth the effort.
A whole new standard just for the “general good of the public” will never get any traction without regulation, and in places like the U.S. where bribery is essentially legal (so long as you call it lobbying), any new regulation like this faces an extreme uphill battle to being introduced except where someone standing to make lots of money is behind it.
Do you actually have to give them the card? Or is it only stored somehow on the phone? I wonder how this works exactly.
When I replaced my old iphone with a new one, I did the whole "transfer everything" dance. Waited around for two hours (didn't restore from icloud, but transferred from old to new), and still had to manually add my CCs to Apple Pay again.
Apple then checks if your card issuer has ApplePay enabled and if so provisions a “virtual” card which is what is stored on the device’s Secure Enclave.
I also just checked my banking app quickly which can initiate the adding of the card to wallet, showing the wallet’s add card screen with the card holder name and the last 4 digits and asking if you want to proceed.
There is no way to see what the full virtual card number is, so there is no way to use this virtual card aside from tapping your phone on CC machines or using websites which have set up ApplePay as a payment method.
CC machines don’t actually have to support ApplePay specifically, as long as it supports tap to pay without insisting on a PIN, then ApplePay works with it. In essence your phone’s NFC exactly implements the same capabilities and protocols as NFC chips on normal credit cards.
IIRC it's not exactly the same. One user-facing example where things are different is that contactless payments with a regular credit card have a 50 € maximum. If there is a limit when paying with the iPhone, it's much higher.
I also seem to recall that the merchant's payment contract must support this, but I'll have to confirm with a colleague. Although Apple Pay support is very common where I live, it did happen a few times that some restaurant's terminal accepted VISA contactless but not Apple Pay.
I've also had a situation where my CC is set up to not allow payments outside my country. Payment with Apple Pay was denied as being "out of country", whereas the physical card worked fine. The store is from a big national chain, in the heart of the capital city.
I’m pretty sure that the limit amount before PIN verification is required is embedded in the NFC, or checked online or something. Both my credit cards have limits of R500 (~26USD) after which it requires I enter my PIN after tapping it.
For one of my credit cards I’m able to pay it off with my other credit card and I have in the past tapped my iPhone to do so for payments over R50,000 (~2600USD), I don’t think there’s a limit.
However, the biggest grocery retail chain here initially had a very annoying “custom” rule on their CC machines where it would ignore the card limit and insist on asking for PIN for any payments over R500, which would cause ApplePay tap attempts to auto decline, they eventually fixed this.
The out of country issue sounds like a configuration issue with your bank or that particular merchant. My cards by default disallow use out of country and I’ve never had an issue tapping anywhere with ApplePay.
Apple has issues with privacy, but I don't really see how this is one of them.
"Somehow" their information makes it around? No, you have to add them, yourself, on every device you use them from, individually.
Now they only sell (arguable mid) pizza, but when I order there it’s delightful (to use an overused 2023 marketing buzzword)
(I too eat Domino's on the odd occasion the app doesn't take long enough for me to change my mind).
I worked in a Pizza Hut delivery place when I was in college. I just took my son back for a campus visit and yeah, 30 years later, its still there - same location and save a few minor changes, the building still has the exact layout. A testament to whoever laid out the original floor plan.
To be fair we don’t have many fast food pizza chains in my country, it’s mostly dominos and a few small ones (with abysmal online order experience)
They’re still the worst about it AFAIK but more of their competitors now do that at least once an order now, too, so the difference isn’t as large.