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Comment by nox101 | Hacker News Reader

> > it also seems payment terminals at the grocery store needed special support for the Apple/Google Pay apps.

> They don't. Unless a given POS terminal is buggy, it'll work anywhere that otherwise accepts the underlying card scheme. The physical and logical protocols are exactly the same as for actual plastic cards and mostly indistinguishable to the terminal; actually breaking Apple Pay/Google Pay support needs a lot of destructive energy on the merchant's/PSP's side.

this doesn't fit my experience. For example, Home Depot doesn't accept apple pay but their chip readers work with other cards. If there's no difference then it would seem impossible for the machines to distinguish apple pay from any other card.

I've had similar issues at many other merchants

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Do their readers do contactless payment at all? Apple/Google Pay are just presenting your phone as a contactless payment card so it should work anywhere a physical card can be used that way.

Do their readers do contactless payment at all?

US-based here...

My local HD does NOT do contactless of any variety. It's chip or swipe.

Same for my local Thai food carry-out.

I would have sworn my local bicycle shop did contactless for cards only (but not devices) - I'll have to test that next time I'm there. It could just be that the pub/cafe side has a contactless reader but the retail side is chip/swipe-only (effectily two businesses in the same space and owned by the same person).

I believe they don't have NFC enabled on the terminals at all. Same with Walmart (allegedly, I haven't been there in a while). I've heard rumours that the reason for this is so they can do customer tracking more reliably, but I'm not sure how much more valuable an actual card PAN is than a DPAN if the DPAN isn't getting rotated.

I’ve seen the data the reader gives us from a dip vs a tap (inserting your card vs NFC) and there is a difference. IIRC we would get the name on the card from a dip but not from a tap. In both cases we get the last 4 digits though.

At Home Depot at least they do this due (in part, if not in whole) to returns. Your virtual card number may change, since it’s generated every time you add it to a device. This breaks their easy return lookup where you simply present the item and your card, no receipt needed.

I actually ran into exactly this when I tried to make a return to Target after losing my receipt. I had replaced my phone and the card number changed. Luckily for random reasons I had my old phone laying around still and was able to come back and return with that.

Having done a receipt based return vs. dozens of card based returns at Home Depot, the staff time involved is orders of magnitude more so I understand why they would turn NFC off. Tracking may be part of this consideration too, but I’d speculate it’s secondary.

> "this doesn't fit my experience. For example, Home Depot doesn't accept apple pay but their chip readers work with other cards."

It must be different in the US, then. In Europe, Canada, and elsewhere, any terminal that accepts standard contactless cards (ie: pretty much 100% of them now days) will accept Apple Pay/Google Pay.

When Apple Pay first launched, there was an issue where some older terminals would apply the unauthenticated contactless payment transaction limit (£50 or whatever), instead of recognising that device-authenticated payments should have no limit. But that's long since been fixed.

I can confirm Home Depot accepts tap of physical cards as well as Apple Pay in Canada.

I don’t know much about the underlying tech, but some large retailers (Target sprints to mind) resisted adding contactless payments and push users to use their own app. Some quick searching indicates they may have added support in 2018 or 2019. It sounds like Walmart still doesn’t support them.

He saying there's no difference between a standard contactless plastic card and using the phone.

I can pay contactlessly with my card, but my bank doesn't support paying with my phone.

My point is that Apple Pay works wherever contactless cards are accepted, but yes, not all card issuers offer Apple Pay in the first place.

> actually breaking Apple Pay/Google Pay support needs a lot of destructive energy on the merchant's/PSP's side.

They do bank whitelisting, not protocol breakage.

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