Developer Access to iPhone's NFC Chip Coming in iOS 11

[Stella]

So then can anybody explain what's the problem, I presume that chip has some form of I/O (or does it just sit there to be complained about...)

The NFC chips inside the iPhone 7 + support NFC Data Exchange Format - a data format such as TCP. Its a common format that allow NFC devices to communicate basically - talking the same language.

I'm assuming its in the firmware that the iPhone 6S / SE lacks NFC chips lack.
http://www.dummies.com/consumer-electronics/nfc-data-exchange-format-ndef/


"Called "Core NFC", the framework will allow apps to read Near Field Communication tags that are compatible with the NFC Data Exchange Format (NDEF)"

I'm sure that someone else has a better understanding.

 

[draugminaion]

Don't get excited everybody. What is in CoreNFC now is very basic. Nothing you couldn't also do with a QR code.

 

[Jeremy1026]

I won't speak to the banking app access, but unless I'm mistaken there is a difference between general access to NFC functionality versus access to the secure digital wallet. Can't imagine that Apple would let anyone else have access to THAT. It would likely destroy any semblance of security.

It only reads while you give permission, and then it has a 60 second time out to actually do the read before it shuts itself back off. Also, there is a prompt on your device that shows that it is being used (and it can't be covered up by developers).

 

[draugminaion]

NFC has been on the verge of breakthrough for years.
https://arstechnica.com/staff/2013/...s-is-mean-girls-and-nfc-isnt-going-to-happen/
Apple is only doing it because the banks like it because they are old and crusty, and apple wants to be in payments.
Consider how Apple could have done iPhone/Watch pairing, AirPod pairing and Mac wakeup with the watch using NFC.
But didn't because there was something better. NFC is yesterday's future that never happened.
The tiny bit of NFC that is now in CoreNFC is only there because Apple's employees want to load the data from their workouts on the machines in the new Apple Park fitness center to their watch.

 

[Mr. Donahue]

Nobody realizes how awesome it's not.

 

[draugminaion]

Yes, Quite possibly
[doublepost=1496832519][/doublepost]That's an Apple AppStore restriction rather than API restriction I assume?

Lame!

Nope. It's totally an API restriction. Basically, an app can register to be notified when NDEF data is read from a tag. Public insecure data. Like when you point your camera a QR code. That's all.

[doublepost=1496832549][/doublepost]
[doublepost=1496833302][/doublepost]
NFC for the masses has been here for a long time - available on android phones!

Yes, and nobody has cared for years.

 

[Stella]

N
Yes, and nobody has cared for years.

Correction: You don't care.

You don't speak for everyone.

 

[ChrisCW11]

7 years late, but magical!

 

[kdarling]

Yawn..... Android two years ago.

More like Android and Blackberry five years ago.

Would love this for my subway pass which can be bought online but has to be loaded to my nfc chip card.

Does that mean Google will be able to port Android Pay to the iPhone? Or those Australian Bank's can make their own payment app?

Nope to either. That would require API support for card emulation mode.

Finally!!! Better late than never! Now we can put that NFC to other uses.

Yes. Funny thing is, I was actually wishing for this yesterday when I wanted to give a contact name/number to my daughter on her iPhone. With other phones, it's just a matter of holding their backs together while one is showing the contact entry.

Basically, a simple NDEF message has a type and a payload. It's totally up to the receiving device as to what it wants to do with it. (And with Android devices, the user can also sometimes pick between apps to open.)

Here are some examples of what can be done via a simple NDEF message sent between phones, using different record types:

Type... Possible Action on receiving device
------- -----------------------------------
App....... Open App Store to that app
Contact... Add new contact
Email....... Create an email with an address
Mime....... Display a picture or play a sound
Text ....... Transfer text
SMS ....... Create text message
Website... Open browser to that site

My son-in-law and I used to sit next to each other on the couch, and constantly touch our phones together to transfer website URLs and YouTube video links.

One of the more useful things was to touch to share the Google Navigation to a new restaurant or other place we're all going to in separate cars. Very handy.

Good stuff, as long as it's secure. Could someone standing near you and running a nefarious app NFC their way into your iPhone?

Barring a code bug, not all by itself, no. But if the phone user was pretty stupid, then yeah.

Let's say a crook tapped against your phone and caused your browser to open to a fake bank website that asked for your bank credentials. You, an incredibly stupid user who doesn't even wondered why your browser was suddenly showing such a page, stupidly enter your account and password.

(Thus more likely on an iPhone, the user would first see some kind of alert that a URL was being passed from another phone, as a warning.)

 

[Olganech]

Yawn..... Android two years ago.

Yawn Symbian 10 years ago.

 

[spacemnspiff]

Nothing like going on a bike ride to the store on a chilly day and having my iPhone battery die from the cold just as I'm about to pay for something. Luckily, the stuff in my wallet doesn't require batteries.

That would be analogous to driving a car without paying attention to gas and the gas tank goes empty, and then blaming on the car that the gas tank went empty. I guess that's partly why AAA is in business.

If I carry a cellphone with a finite battery life, I need to know approximately when will the battery will die and have a plan to recharge the device every so often to prevent being in a situation with a dead battery.

 

[draugminaion]

Correction: You don't care.

You don't speak for everyone.

Oh, I care. I get paid to care. I make firmware for RFID devices and a companion android app that uses NFC to communicate with them. I know NFC under the hood, it's old and clunky stuf, salvaged from ancient RFID standards. NFC is useful when physical proximity is a requirement, like opening a door or turnstile. Or when phones want to talk to legacy infrastructure like payments where the tech has to be simple enough to fit inside a credit card. Plastic cards to pay for stuff is not the future, it's the past. When we no longer use plastic cards to pay for stuff NFC has no business being on the phone.

 

[spacemnspiff]

Barring a code bug, not all by itself, no. But if the phone user was pretty stupid, then yeah.

Or if the code was smart enough to hack into the phone.

Some of the uses you mentioned about sharing links etc. eliminate just one step in sending similar information between phones. This can easily be done via text message. Apart from that there is Airplay and apps that I have used in the past, if I recall correctly was called 'Bump', where you bump two phones with BT turned on, which I believe came out 8 years ago.

 

[draugminaion]

Yawn Symbian 10 years ago.

I too remember Nokia dutifully pushing the NFC cart for years.
Without much result.
A solution looking for a problem for a decade.

 

[Olganech]

I too remember Nokia dutifully pushing the NFC cart for years.
Without much result.
A solution looking for a problem for a decade.

Yes Nokia used to sell their NFC tags and there was the NFC Writer that you could program.

Come home tap your phone on the tag and have your music start playing.

Or have one in your car and have driving mode and sat nav start automatically.


Apple seem to be drip feeding their customers with old tech and selling it as new.

 

[JohnApples]

You can add your Hilton digital key to Wallet and allow access from the lock screen if you want. That saves some steps. Still not a nice as NFC would be like you mentioned.

Hmm. I tried that and it still required me to unlock my phone and load up the HHonors app. Maybe I wasn't doing it right? No idea

Either way, I do agree that NFC would be the most elegant solution. Especially if it could work on an Apple Watch!

 

[draugminaion]

Yes Nokia used to sell their NFC tags and there was the NFC Writer that you could program.

Come home tap your phone on the tag and have your music start playing.

Or have one in your car and have driving mode and sat nav start automatically.


Apple seem to be drip feeding their customers with old tech and selling it as new.

Apple is not selling NFC. The term is nowhere in Apple's marketing material. They have to put up with it for now because of the banks. Except for Apple Pay they skipped it.
Consider pairing AirPods and Apple Watch or using the watch to unlock a Mac, perfect use cases for NFC, in the NFC consortium narrative. Apple wasn't interested.

 

[Stella]

Then you'd better change your career hadn't you - you'll become an ancient relic, like a Cobol programmer. Why are you working on a product no one cares about, according to your last post...

Oh, I care. I get paid to care. I make firmware for RFID devices and a companion android app that uses NFC to communicate with them. I know NFC under the hood, it's old and clunky stuf, salvaged from ancient RFID standards. NFC is useful when physical proximity is a requirement, like opening a door or turnstile. Or when phones want to talk to legacy infrastructure like payments where the tech has to be simple enough to fit inside a credit card. Plastic cards to pay for stuff is not the future, it's the past. When we no longer use plastic cards to pay for stuff NFC has no business being on the phone.

 

[kdarling]

Or if the code was smart enough to hack into the phone.

What on earth are you talking about? No code is passed. Just things like URLs.

Same as with a text message. E.g. if you got an email text from someone unknown with a URL to open, and you opened it and gave away a password, then that's not the fault of the message delivery system.

Some of the uses you mentioned about sharing links etc. eliminate just one step in sending similar information between phones. This can easily be done via text message.

NOT unless you know the other person's phone number. And even then, not as easily or quickly.

You see, each type of comms has its purpose.

In this case, NFC is meant for anonymously exchanging info during a nearly direct contact, WITHOUT having to know anything personal or otherwise about the recipient.

A few years back I had a tourist come through my neighborhood looking for a nearby park. There are two entrances, and Google navigation did not know that one was closed during the week. Since we both had Android phones, and he was savvy and had NFC transfer turned on, I simply brought up the correct entrance on my phone's map, held it up to his phone, and it transferred the destination to which he could then navigate.

No personal info or third party app necessary.

Note also that the common NDEF record types that I listed, are universal. So I could even give a contact on my Android phone to someone with a Blackberry or Symbian phone back then.

All that said, it sounds like Apple only intends it to be used simply for reading NFC tags at stores or on Apple products. Probably they'll sell their own NFC tags with unique IDs at a high price, and somehow only allow those to be read.

Apart from that there is Airplay and apps that I have used in the past, if I recall correctly was called 'Bump', where you bump two phones with BT turned on, which I believe came out 8 years ago.

Bump sent the two phone's locations up to a server, which figured out who those phones belonged to, and transferred info between them. Thus you had to sign up for the service. And probably not be in a close crowd of people Bumping.

You know, your post reminds me of the kind of naysaying I used to get years ago before Apple Pay existed, when I would talk about NFC payments here. "Why would I want to make a contactless payment with my phone??" was the usual response. Years later when Apple Pay finally came out, the answer was clear

 

[draugminaion]

Then you'd better change your career hadn't you - you'll become an ancient relic, like a Cobol programmer. Why are you working on a product no one cares about, according to your last post...

Yup. Totally ancient relic.
But the money, man.
You know what they pay people who are willing to put on their snorkel and get poop in their beards working the legacy sewer?
But I have limits.
No COBOL.

One day I'll go indy.
And make artsy fartsy iOS games.

 

[Bacillus]

Interesting discussion, but I don't see any (security) reason why Apple should have impaired iP6/6S NFC functionality versus iP7. Assume it could be corrected via a firmware upgrade...

 

[Crzyrio]

No, but I have yet to find a technical reason. Care providing one?

No one except people at Apple. But comon, do you seriosly think Apple thought: "Lets not include Night Shift on the older 32bit phones because SOO many people will want it SOO badly that they will upgrade".

100% they could have found way to include it but including it could also likely resulted in lesser than accepted power draw, time to test it fully not worth the trade off for a 4 year old device.

 

[Flytrap21]

Does that mean Google will be able to port Android Pay to the iPhone? Or those Australian Bank's can make their own payment app?

No... this seems to be just the NDEF compatibility. NFC Payments requires Card Emulation spec.

 

[kdarling]

No one except people at Apple. But comon, do you seriosly think Apple thought: "Lets not include Night Shift on the older 32bit phones because SOO many people will want it SOO badly that they will upgrade".

Why not? Apple does that all the time with features that are known to work on older devices. They're infamous for doing so.

Heck, remember Siri running on older iPhones before Apple bought it, and then Apple claimed it could not be made to run on those exact same older iPhones?

 

[lunarworks]

That would be analogous to driving a car without paying attention to gas and the gas tank goes empty, and then blaming on the car that the gas tank went empty. I guess that's partly why AAA is in business.

If I carry a cellphone with a finite battery life, I need to know approximately when will the battery will die and have a plan to recharge the device every so often to prevent being in a situation with a dead battery.

When it gets cold my iPhone 6's battery dies VERY fast, even at a +50% charge.

What I'm saying is it's unwise to rely completely on something that can run out of juice when there are options that don't. Unexpected situations do happen. I don't have to worry about my tap-to-pay debit card running out of batteries, so it stays on me whenever I'm out.