Comment by hoistbypetard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hoistbypetard | Hacker News Reader

When Apple Pay first started to become common, I looked hard at it through the lens of my own retail payment processing experience. One of the things that impressed me most about it at the time was just how rooted in industry standards it was. None of it from the radio back was Apple-specific at all at the time, and by my read of this piece, that has held up through the present.

At the time, I recall a few merchants who were intentionally accepting card-based tap-to-pay needing to alter their systems because they found themselves accidentally accepting the very standards-based Apple tap-to-pay, and they didn't want to. (CVS comes specifically to mind... IIRC they were part of a competing scheme, and they wanted the fact that their competing scheme was accepted at their retail locations to help differentiate that scheme from Apple Pay.)

I'm goad the author took the time to do a more current review in this context, because when the "only Apple Pay does this" mythology started to emerge recently, I was scratching my head, wondering if something had changed since I had last gotten to look.

Sharing a personal anecdote - when Apple Pay first launched, it only worked in the US. A more accurate statement though was it could only be set up in the US. I very shortly after moved to Australia, where tap-to-pay is the standard.

It was kind of crazy because despite not officially being supported, Apple Pay worked everywhere in Australia. Whereas only a small handful of merchants supported it in the US, 99% of point of sales in Australia supported it because it was based off the standard.

I had a similar experience. After it was released in the US, I took a trip to the Netherlands. I had a lot of “how did you do that?” reactions from merchants when I paid for things with my phone.

I had a similar experience traveling in Europe! More than one merchant thought I had “hacked” them initially.

I had the same experience as you on a trip to the Netherlands. Ironically, the only place where it didn't work was the Apple store in Amsterdam. I don't know if that was an actual technical limitation, or they were aware that it was not yet available in the Netherlands and so didn't even let me try with my phone and its US credit card.

Depends on country, and how contactless cards being the norm in many places meant there was less push among people for payment with phones, compared to USA where it seems it no modern bits for card payments happened between introduction of magnetic strip and phone-based EMV2 NFC payments.

I remember changing card ~2012, in Poland, because my ancient Visa Electron with magstripe-only was confusing to new cashiers who thought lack of chip meant it's contactless. Around that time phone-based "cards" were also widely promoted though the tech wasn't exactly ready yet so you needed cooperation between banks and telcos to provide secure element.

This also worked in reverse. When I was visiting the USA, when I tapped my credit card to pay on terminals that were seemingly set up for Apple Pay, it was mind-blowing for some people. I didn’t realise contactless cards were so rare over there at the time.

Same, I used Apple Pay in Germany before it was officially launched there and people were very surprised that I could just pay with my Watch. Contactless payment was already becoming more prevalent, so it worked in a lot of places.

It was standards based, but the way Apple ran the launch and marketing (kind of genius, actually), they gave the impression that Apple Pay was the only phone-based tap-to-pay around. Merchants would have signs saying "Apple Pay accepted" but not mention Google, leading to confusion over whether non-Apple payments would work.

Part of that is definitely the confusing state of payments on Android. Samsung Pay could refer to either NFC or magstripe-emulation. Google, of course, is terrible at branding stuff, and between Wallet and the many iterations of Google Pay it's still difficult to figure out what's what.

> Samsung Pay could refer to either NFC or magstripe-emulation

Last time I checked, you've got to swipe a magnetic-stripe card (we mainly use C&P/contactless). Unless there's some really cool sci-fi pop-up plastic tab inside the phone / case / a separate re-programmable card, I'm really curious as to how this could work?

I haven't been able to find a detailed explanation of how it works. Somehow it emits a magnetic pulse that simulates the card being swiped, without having to physically swipe the card. Best guess is that it uses some kind of magnetic induction to induce a current in the reader the same way that a swipe would.

I never had a Samsung phone so I can't comment on how it worked in practice or the reliability. Can't find any mention of having to hold your phone a particular way so presumably it's direction-independent, although apparently sometimes it might not be possible to hold your phone close enough for the reader to pick it up.

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

The funniest thing to me is how people forget that Apple Pay was late addition to mobile payment game. Practically the last one to enter the market.

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