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.
[…]
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
2 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
> 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.
