iPhone NFC Access Outside EU
Hartley Charlton (Hacker News):
Apple today announced that developers will soon be able to offer NFC transactions in their own apps for the first time – something that is mostly exclusive to Apple Pay at present.
Starting with iOS 18.1 later this year, developers will be able to offer in-app contactless transactions, separate from Apple Pay and Apple Wallet, using new APIs. This opens up new possibilities for in-store payments, car keys, closed-loop transit, corporate badges, student IDs, home keys, hotel keys, merchant loyalty and rewards cards, and event tickets, as well as government IDs in the future.
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Developers will need to request the NFC and Secure Enclave entitlement, enter into a commercial agreement with Apple, and pay the associated fees.
It’s unclear what the fees and business terms are. I presume it will be like CarPlay where some developers get the entitlement and others never even get a response.
So not only can other apps do this, other apps can take over the “double-press the side button” shortcut on iPhones. This means Google Pay, PayPal, ShopPay, or countless other existing, popular wallets could be your wallet and accessed in a moment to pay in stores (after they’ve added support for this, of course). Wonderful!
I’m sure Apple was going to do this anyway and this has nothing to do with regulatory pressures, right? 😉
While Apple pushed back on opening up NFC for what it has called privacy and security reasons, let’s be honest: a huge driving factor has been $ as Apple takes a % of Apple Pay transactions. But, fear not! Apple will charge third-parties for the feature.
Previously:
- Apple Commits to Opening NFC in EU
- Digital Wallets and the “Only Apple Pay Does This” Mythology
- U.S. Sues Apple Over iPhone Monopoly
- Apple Still Sitting on Entitlement Requests
Update (2024-09-23): Joel Breckinridge Bassett:
Open NFC is the payments version of DMA ‘open’ app store government regulation. The EU Marketplace Fairness Act (MFA) wants to forbid Apple from monetizing its Apple Pay IP and infrastructure from all developers who want to use the embedded secure element for NFC payments. iOS 17.4 Apple Host Card Emulation was Apple’s answer to EU demands that has now been formalized with a few more conditions.
Open NFC, HCE, is not about being open and never was. It is limited to EMV protocol payments and benefits EMV consortium member payment networks as they can use proprietary without paying for the privilege. It is also limited to EMV based payment app developers who have the necessary resources to deploy the necessary security protocols for cloud processing.
Apple announced a new iOS 18.1 API for iPhone: the NFC & SE Platform, a new framework for in-app NFC transactions using iPhone XS and later Secure Element.
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It sounds like fun, but it could be a headache for users when it comes to Wallet app Express Mode. Yes folks, despite all the excitement the potential downside is that we might have to deal with NFC-clash. Let’s take a look at in-App supported transactions broken out by Wallet app Express Mode and non-Express Mode categories[…]
[…]
There we have it, all in-app NFC transactions require double-click authorization, they don’t get Express Mode which remains a Wallet app exclusive.
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> While Apple pushed back on opening up NFC for what it has called privacy and security reasons, let’s be honest: a huge driving factor has been $ as Apple takes a % of Apple Pay transactions. But, fear not! Apple will charge third-parties for the feature.
sErViCeS
I wonder if this will finally allow iPhones to use NFC for Korean public transit networks. It has worked in Japan for some years but not in Korea due to some kind of technical limitation in the way both sides operate NFC functionality, limiting public transit tap-to-pay to Android only. News articles have been speculating for the past two years that hints of T-money (Korea's public transit scheme) interoperability were appearing in Apple documentation, but nothing official yet. Maybe this move will help move this along.
