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Comment by fidotron | Hacker News Reader

Japan has a funny relationship with Apple. For example, the Felica ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FeliCa ) based ticket system is built into every iPhone globally, making life in Japan significantly easier for foreign iOS users. More surprisingly actually using the tickets does not require any app at all - you just use Apple Pay.

This is all narrowing the scope of what advantages native apps have (they do still have advantages), but it's hard to argue they simply aren't moving gatekeeping to other areas.

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FeliCa Networks support is the direct result of the fact that mobile transit and mobile payments use in Japan predates the iPhone. Mobile Suica and Osaifu-Keitai already existed, and Apple needed to compete. It started with Japanese SKU iPhones but expanded globally.

Even now in Japan, mobile payments are anything but a monopoly. When Apple is forced to compete, they do things like add Suica with Express Transit. PayPay, a made-in-Japan QR code payments app is more prevalent than credit card payments here.

Android phones don't support it globally so saying that Apple is "forced" to compete where Android doesn't proves the point that they're doing more than needed.

Just because you can provision Felica cards outside of Japan doesn't mean that you can actually use them. It's not really global support if you can add Suica in the US and then not use it. More likely is that Felica Networks agreed with this logic and Apple is only paying the license fee for JP devices, or has some side deal about not delineating between regions. If Apple didn't support Felica, it would just move more users in Japan onto physical cards or Android.

On recent US SKU iPhones — don’t know how recent —- you can add a Suica card directly to Apple Wallet annd use it anywhere the physical card is accepted. No weird regional deals.

It is only accepted in Japan.

Which isn't Apple's problem to solve...? I'm not sure what your point is.

If a Suica reader existed in the US it would work.

Which btw is a shame. JRE would make a bank if they enabled it for Tap to Pay on iPhone worldwide.

Other transit cards are available in Apple Wallet!

Felica cards work worldwide on iPhone, there is no limitation that the phone is in Japan to use them.

iPhone just wasn't going to exit the curious gadget status and become a first class citizen in the Japanese phone market without it. Same for emoji support and flick inputs and lots of those little things.

They were never forced to compete in the sense that no one is forced to be first class citizen anywhere. Apple just wanted to be by its own free will. That's technically correct.

Android have those features in Japan but not worldwide. iPhone has them worldwide.

But that part is on Apple. They could have made it Japan SKU exclusive. It isn't solely because it's their policy that an iPhone is universally an iPhone and there will never ever be Verizon backplates or brown box CostCo specials with plastic backplates. No one else cares, so everyone else make FeliCa enabled versions as Japan specials.

FeliCa is simply a patent issue. Apple got some sort of sweetheart deal somewhere.

Every Google Pixel has FeliCa its just turned off on non-Japan phones due to said licensing, though people have rooted the phone to turn it on.

Apple having such a dominant hold of market share in the smartphone space gave a lot of leverage when negotiating royalties with Sony who makes the felica stuff. From what I heard it was basically just gifted to them, because if Apple says no we wont support it, then you lose a huge amount of users. Whereas with other manufacturers they pay on a per device basis tracked by the underlying osaifu-keitai stuff. If you are rooted though it is usually just 1 flag or something you need to change. Been using my US Pixel 6 for years daily on my commutes.

https://github.com/jjyao88/unlock-felica-pixel

Japan has higher iOS market share (64%) than the US (59%) or the UK (47%) or Europe (34%).

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/japan

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