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Apple Opening Up iPhone's NFC Chip to Third-Party Developers in iOS 18.1

alexandr said:
So would this bring the Tap to Pay options for apps like Venmo and PayPal?
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Assuming they meet the regulatory requirements to operate as a bank in each region they want to operate and pay Apple the appropriate technology licensing fees, sure.
 
davide_eu said:
a$$le pay doesn't have to pay any fee, so there is space for anti trust fine!
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The banks do pay a fee for apple pay. I believe this move is intended to discourage banks from discontinuing support for apple pay to save fees and discourage others from requesting access to the iphone’s nfc.
 
whitby said:
I must admit to being completely perplexed by Apple’s reluctance to allowing the use of the NFC hardware by third parties in the iPhone. I know we need some protection from malevolent third party developers but to only allow Apple to use it seems somewhat counter productive. I applaud the decision to allow third party access and hope to see some new uses for the iPhone that will make it more useful. It always seem we have to force Apple to get them to give us full access to hardware we purchased. It generally points to the hard fact that the iPhone is a Trojan horse designed to allow Apple and only Apple to provide services that they can monetize at a later date.
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After reading this article it seems to me that the nfc and secure enclave go hand in hand with each other and one can’t be opened up without opening up the other too. This would explain apple’s spirited refusal for years.
 
jgreg728 said:
This is fine as long as Apple Pay stays an option. Taking that option away from the hundreds of millions of users in favor of a separate app isn't a good thing either. I don't want to set a different wallet app to every single card I own.
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Which I believe is why they’re charging for access to the nfc. The only reason for banks to pull out of apple pay in favor of their own wallet app would be to save apple’s fees, but if they’ll now be paying fees anyway then it makes less sense for them to discontinue their apple pay support.
 
lartola said:
The banks do pay a fee for apple pay. I believe this move is intended to discourage banks from discontinuing support for apple pay to save fees and discourage others from requesting access to the iphone’s nfc.
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I believe it comes out of the card manufacturers fee, I.E. Mastercard, and Visa.
 
mdatwood said:
My concern is that banks will pull their cards from Apple Pay and now I'm opening 5 different apps in order to use tap to pay. IMO, that's not a win for consumers and is a big step backwards.
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If Apple charges for access to the iphone’s nfc, as the article says, then it makes less sense for banks to pull out of apple pay unless they want to go back to physical cards only as they were until 2014. They won’t save any money anymore by switching to their app instead of apple pay.
 
bigchrisfgb said:
I believe it comes out of the card manufacturers fee, I.E. Mastercard, and Visa.
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Perhaps. Still, many banks were reluctant to join apple pay because of that fee (BBVA in Spain, for instance, waited years to join, their branch in Mexico still hasn’t joined) and many are concerned that opening up the nfc could mean those banks and maybe others pull out of it. Charging for access to the iphone’s nfc discourages that behavior since they won’t be saving any money anyway.
 
MNWildFan said:
And I don't think it's going anywhere

Why on earth would they just strip that away from all of us when it's wildly successful

This in essence is just an extension to that
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Least of all if they also have to pay a fee for their own app to use the iphone’s nfc.
 
mdatwood said:
Have you dealt with banks lately? They will do anything to save a penny regardless of customer experience.
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But if apple will now also charge them a fee for their apps to use the iphone’s nfc then they’re no longer saving any money by pulling out of apple pay. The only way they’d save now is to eliminate mobile payments altogether and stick to physical cards only.
 
dwaite said:
Moves like this may eventually make Walmart regret special ordering custom payment terminals just to get them without contactless hardware.
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They didn’t to that. Their pinpads do have the contactless hardware, they just turned it off via software. I wish the manufacturers of card readers stopped including in them the ability to turn on/off the nfc at will, just like they don’t allow it for the chip and stripe.
 
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lartola said:
Perhaps. Still, many banks were reluctant to join apple pay because of that fee (BBVA in Spain, for instance, waited years to join, their branch in Mexico still hasn’t joined) and many are concerned that opening up the nfc could mean those banks and maybe others pull out of it. Charging for access to the iphone’s nfc discourages that behavior since they won’t be saving any money anyway.
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Nothing is free. Apple provides a convenient service with Apple Pay and that service cost money to maintain so they have to charge companies a 5% fee to use that service. Apple is not crazy profiting off of Apple Pay service to companies. Wish Walmart would understand that. I think Visa and Mastercard charge Walmart a 2% fee to use there chip card service. Either way Walmart is paying some kind of card processing fee so in the end even if they don’t offer Apple Pay, they are still paying a fee
 
lartola said:
After reading this article it seems to me that the nfc and secure enclave go hand in hand with each other and one can’t be opened up without opening up the other too. This would explain apple’s spirited refusal for years.
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NFC for payments is tied to secure enclave. NFC has been open for use and access for years.
 
dwaite said:
Assuming they meet the regulatory requirements to operate as a bank in each region they want to operate and pay Apple the appropriate technology licensing fees, sure.
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I would hope they would answer yes to all of the above. Would sure beat having to scan each other's QR codes.
 
gregmancuso said:
It is possible to add many, if not all, today. Apple opened NFC up to all but payment in iOS 13 (Pass.NFC). There are also apps that can add NFC cards to Wallet (NFC Tools). I haven’t played much with this, but the capability is already there for much of this.
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I’ve been tapping my phone to pay for the commuter light rail for years, and now the office has nfc for door access where my phone can stay in my pocket to unlock the doors.
 
timeislove said:
I rather see merchants and banks using Apple wallet as a hub to access or store sensitive info than launching their own apps, hence insisting users to use merchant apps for different things, keys, ids, event tickets.

At the end, we will have to install too many apps.
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I sort of wish Apple had worked to do more to integrate more banks/credit cards into the Wallet like the Apple Card.

Though I don’t know if that is an Apple issue or just a problem with how backwards and out dated the US financial services tend to be. Chip card tech is technically older than I am and only really became big in the USA within the last 10 years and contactless has been around a long time as well and only got pushed durning covid.
 
The_Gream said:
I sort of wish Apple had worked to do more to integrate more banks/credit cards into the Wallet like the Apple Card.

Though I don’t know if that is an Apple issue or just a problem with how backwards and out dated the US financial services tend to be. Chip card tech is technically older than I am and only really became big in the USA within the last 10 years and contactless has been around a long time as well and only got pushed durning covid.
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I know a nos of you are not fans of monopolies.

Yet, I really don’t like to install different mechant apps to store different passes and event tickets. Some of the bank apps are huge too!


On the other hand, there must some barrier or frictions hindering the incorporation of bank cards into wallet, maybe Apple is too heavy hand on sub-charges.


Apps should utilise the os facilities as much as possible, rather than building their own, which at the end imply too much hassle to users and holding up storage space.

One example is the authenticator. iOS implements its own authentication, yet a nos of apps require users install 3rd authentication app, Google, Norton, etc. it does not make sense at all.
 
bigchrisfgb said:
This. My local transit authority here in the U.K. has a pre-paid card that is used by younger people, people with disabilities, etc. Even our local football team has a prepaid card that gives fans free travel before and after a match.
You could use that card on Androids, but not for iPhones because Apple never responded to our transit authorities requests.
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As someone who does a lot of work for our local transit agency, I hear you! This should finally allow more transit agencies to use tap to pay rather than QR codes.
 
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yanksfan114 said:
As much as look forward to different use cases and increased competition over this change, I worry this will fragment Apple Wallet. I'll be so mad if, for example, Amex or LifeTime or any of my other passes don't work in the Wallet app or with Apple Pay anymore because they want me to go into their app to use them. Pros and cons to this but we'll see how it shakes out.
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Agreed. The “walled garden” has always been what attracted me to Apple. I think the end of an era has begun. Indeed, everything in life is a trade-off.
 
cdsapplefan said:
Nothing is free. Apple provides a convenient service with Apple Pay and that service cost money to maintain so they have to charge companies a 5% fee to use that service. Apple is not crazy profiting off of Apple Pay service to companies. Wish Walmart would understand that. I think Visa and Mastercard charge Walmart a 2% fee to use there chip card service. Either way Walmart is paying some kind of card processing fee so in the end even if they don’t offer Apple Pay, they are still paying a fee
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What do you mean by companies? Apple only charges the banks/card issuers a fee, not the merchants, the fee being 0.15% not 5%. And Walmart obviously has some reason to reject Apple Pay and contactless other than saving any money worth of fees, which as you said they’re not saving anyway; that’s a widespread myth about the fees being the reason why walmart rejects apple pay/contactless.

Furthermore, if a service costs money to maintain then why isn’t Google charging anyone for accessing the nfc on android devices? because they’re not charging for that. It’s always been open to everyone and free. Apple is just being excessively greedy.
 
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black_knight said:
Oh, you betcha this will happen. We can thank the EU for this trash.
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It doesn’t make sense anymore for banks to do that. It might have made sense before if they thought they’d save apple’s fee by pulling out of apple pay in favor of pushing their own nfc payments app, but now it’s clear that’s not the case as apple will charge them a fee anyway.
 
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