Hacker News Reader

Comment by kmeisthax | Hacker News Reader

Ironically, Apple just announced P2P payments.

Which means this is almost certainly a temporary closure. Google will almost certainly relaunch with a new name, branding, and UX that rides on the coattails of Apple's marketing efforts, but P2P will be coming back. If you're competing with Apple, you can't just not do a thing Apple is doing.

View on HN

Apple has had P2P payments for a while. Yesterday's announcement was that now you can tap to pay for those. Before, you'd have to send money via iMessage.

I think it's most likely still going to be sending money "via iMessage" (or more precisely: via a book transfer between two Green Dot Visa prepaid card accounts, addressed by an iCloud address and initiated over iMessage in UX terms).

What is new here exactly? This is AppleCash, which has been around for years.

If I'm understanding correctly, the difference is that it's going through VISA directly. Kind of like how you can send someone a Starbucks gift card through iMessage / Messages app, without it ever going through Apple Cash technically.

How so? It only works between two Apple Cash accounts, so it can just be a book transfer within the bank maintaining these (Green Dot), no Visa required.

Or do they now allow it between two non-Apple-Cash debit cards? That would indeed require some network to work across banks.

In the case of Starbucks, they're taking advantage of an API within the Messages app, so as long as a third party implements something similar to what Starbucks is doing, I assume any other banking app could do the same, like Zelle could theoretically have their app allow you to just send cash via Messages if they implement the code needed for the Messages app. Now whether or not Apple would allow it is another story. I appreciate them gate keeping garbage from their app store, but they shouldnt just gate keep things they themselves do, its anti-competitive.

Yeah, but the new feature presented yesterday is not that. It's just a new (and definitely useful!) contact discovery and payment request initiation channel for Apple Cash (which has been around for a few years now), as far as I can tell.

I can pay you by tapping the top of my iPhone to the top of your iPhone. https://youtu.be/Own9MiaP57o?t=270

I was/am a little confused, too, but Apple specifically called out not needing to share phone numbers/contact info, so that’s probably it.

It’s brokered via NFC now. Tap to pay with no business account.

Yes and no. It's still a cash-equivalent transaction, requiring you to either have an Apple Cash balance and/or an attached checking account or debit card (in the USA at least).

It's also only available in the US, I believe.

Too late now to edit my original comment but this is what I missed: you can tap two phones together to transfer p2p. I.e. not iMessage mediated.

https://www.macrumors.com/2024/06/11/tap-to-cash-ios-18-pay-...

Apple has had apple cash sendable via imessage for years. They added sending it via bumping phones in ios 18

The other part of the new feature was that you don't need to share your phone number or other information to do it via NFC or whatever they use.

P2P is a loss making feature for nearly everyone involved. If you have some other way to obtaining users and maintaining growth, you are better off not supporting P2P payments.

P2P payments are also extremely tiny portion of revenue.

Funny but i have to agree. Hope they dont rename it as Vertex Pay

Like the post above notes, currently:

Pay -> Android Pay -> Google Pay -> Google Wallet

Maybe:

Google Wallet -> Android Wallet -> Wallet -> Pay

For a nice ecological circle. With the large predator dying and decomposing back to Pay, and their skin being made into a Wallet, because of its monopolistic pointlessness, and lack of ability to implement even a credit card with a 400,000 customer waitlist.

https://cdn.britannica.com/35/153035-050-7E98F055/food-chain...

Nah, the next three service will all be called Google Wallet and they'll be completely independent and incompatible.

The fourth one will be called Google Wallet Duo

https://goomics.net/239/

>If you're competing with X, you can't just not do a thing X is doing

this simply isn't true

there are reasons to compete, like not lose the share of those who find that feature important, or to attack the profitability of that service for your competitor

but there are reasons not to compete, like losing too much money and not impacting your competitor.

This is why Google and Apple as corporations barely look alike at all.

You’re making a trivial claim. When I say the sun will probably rise tomorrow, I’m not saying that anything that happens before will happen again.

I'm not making a trivial claim, read a few books by Michael Porter then come back and talk.

Then Google will inexplicably move the functionality from Wallet into their new GeminiPay or whatever app, but GeminiPay will only be available in half ths markets Wallet was in. Then in 5 years GeminiPay will be deprecated and Wallet will be brought back with half of its original functionality.

Google does a lot of things that Apple doesn't, and vice versa.

Apple has only announced a new payment initiation/contact information exchange channel for an existing P2P payment service, as far as I can tell.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com