Hacker News Reader

Comment by aikinai | Hacker News Reader

The iOS and Android part was hard to follow, so I'm not sure if the article is wrong or just unclear. All iPhones since iPhone 7 support FeliCa regardless of the phone region. This is incredibly convenient for visitors to Japan.

On the other hand, Android phones only support it if they are Japan-region phones.

View on HN

All iPhones worldwide since iPhone 8, Japanese iPhones starting from iPhone 7.

Source: I had an iPhone 7, and was friends with one of the engineers who added FeliCa support to the secure enclave. The Japanese 7 was a one-off until the 8 made it ubiquitous.

Oh, nice! I wish you/they could share some war stories from that, but the combination of Apple and smartcard industry NDAs probably make that inadvisable.

I love the technology, but I'm not a fan of the culture of security by obscurity in that industry. What's worst is that it's at this point mostly unnecessary! Modern smart cards largely use standard algorithms and would probably hold up just as well or even better with their details publicly documented.

Also, small nit: Secure element. The secure enclave is Apple's cryptography and key management coprocessor running an L4-based OS; a secure element is a (generally not Apple specific) smartcard-like hardened microcontroller that can be embedded in devices, usually as part of the SoC of a contactless microcontroller.

The secure enclave primarily holds the user's and Apple's keys; the secure element can also hold somebody else's, e.g. payment or IC card issuers'. The latter is (somewhat ironically, given the name) somebody's trusted enclave in an otherwise untrusted device.

I didn't make this clear enough in the article, sorry for the mix-up! Yes, iPhones support Osaifu-Keitai, and it's Android phones which have this problem. I've now updated the article to clarify this.

A writing feedback: After you added the "Clarification" update, you could also have put something like "Update (read below)" in the bold part "NFC-F support is not enough to use your phone as an IC card".

Otherwise, thanks for writing this article, it is very insightful, especially the whole parallel NFC standards development process in the early days of the technology by Japanese companies like Sony.

Yes that is correct.

Patents hold it back on Android. Apple just got themselves a licensing deal that apparently lets them just have it on all phones.

Note that on global Pixels it isn't hard to enable, either via root or flashing Japanese variants of the factory images.

This is such a Hacker News comment.

Yes I'm not claiming it's ideal, it'd be nice not to worry about such things as a tourist, it can't be that hard or expensive for Google to just let everyone use the feature.

But at least if you move to Japan, you can essentially get a Japanese flavored Pixel at the small cost of a factory unlock/relock.

The iPhone is really big in Japan (it's one of the few countries where it has a higher market share than in the US) which probably makes it more worthwhile for Apple

I do wonder who it is that has all of these android phones in the US (nearly 40% by the statistics). In my extended friend group only one person other than me uses an Android phone.

> I do wonder who it is that has all of these android phones in the US (nearly 40% by the statistics).

I'm guessing it's largely the working class and undocumented immigrants. And probably lots of burner phones?

Android is overwhelmingly preferred by working-class people, in my experience. The phones are simply cheaper.

Or more powerful and more expensive, such as every single foldable phone on the market, including my Oppo Find N5.

People who can't afford to spend $599 on a phone. Or those who can afford it but can send picture messages all the same on a phone that costs hundreds less.

That doesn't make any sense. It's supported on local phones for both iOS and Android. What iOS does that's special is enable FeliCa for all regions globally. It only affects people from outside Japan traveling there.¹

Since it's not free for them, I assume they determined the amount of people in their key demographic that visit Japan was worth providing a stellar experience. Considering 2.7 million Americans visited last year, it was probably a bet that's paying off.

¹ Or, incidentally, people who live there but purchase phones overseas to avoid an obnoxious camera shutter sound forced on at all times.

I think it's more like difference in commitment to product and sales model between Apple and every other phone manufacturers. Apple really commits deeply into making singular globally unified phones and rejecting pressures to make carrier branded bastard children of iPhone. None of Android phone manufacturers are as committed - even Google - and so unnecessary features gets removed from non-Japanese phones, even the same models were sold globally as well as in Japan(not always the case as Japanese businesspeople generally hate more to think about exports than about lost opportunities and there had historically been obscenely abundant supply of Japan-only electronics).

It's surprising that it can be added back on Pixels, I thought it would use something like factory generated certificates.

It's probably more of a licensing fee thing, just editing the SKU in the deviceinfo partition of a global Pixel suffices to enable Osaifu Keitai. It's the same hardware everywhere, only licensing restrictions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com