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Samsung Acquires Apple Pay Rival LoopPay
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Google Wallet is not really an also-ran since it's been out for several years.
That said, I do agree that LoopPay is not really bringing much peace of mind to the industry like ApplePay does. To transmit a magnetic field containing *actual* credit card details is wide open for abuse and sniffing.
I think you "hit the nail on the head" with your statemens. Loopy requires a case or other attachment for the "funky coil." Note that the picture is an iPhone in a bulky case. Although Samsung could build it into the phone, it will take space and the coil could interfere with other electronics. Plus this is a short term issue until NFC and chips take over. Loop did well to sell. Samsung did bad to buy.
Stick to your wallet solution that no one uses. It will probably do better than loopy, this time next year.
This "sled" solution relies on proximity which isn't guaranteed effective, so users are going to run into readers which can't read the magnetic field (like those you shove the whole card into). New reader makers are going to be faced with "oh, don't forget Samsung phones need XYZ specs on the reader or it won't work" with a lot of the makers saying "screw it, Samsung doesn't have enough of the market to bother". We still have almost no readers capable of handling "chip" based cards (the norm in Europe).
There probably were a bunch of mag-stripe formats attempted early on. We don't remember the failures because they failed.
wow, you guys are really brainwashed... apple copied NFC payments! there's so much bias in here it's unbelievable.
Good for LoopPay to cash out before their tech becomes obsolete! Everyone will be required to use chipped cards soon, not magnetic strip. While it won't immediately happen, its days are numbered. Smart move! For the seller anyway.
No one "copied" NFC payments.
That'd be like saying someone copied Lasagna. It's a generic term for a variety of different implementations and features.
That being said, you are absolutely correct, Apple was not the first to offer an NFC payment solution. But they're damn sure the ones with the most popular and most disruptive solution.
Nobody claims Apple didn't copy NFC payments.
We note that Apple made it WORK, out of the box, across the board, with less fiddling, and with more banks etc, than anyone else - and now all the others "copied from" are scrambling.
Apple didn't invent MP3 players either. "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." (look it up.) Nonetheless, they dominated the industry, and took it places others couldn't.
ETA: some stores supporting
Pay note it made up some 80% of point-of-sale electronic payments within mere weeks of iPhone 6 release. Google Wallet et al never broke, what, 1%? in YEARS?Loop Pay is super clever, but it seems that all I'd need to clone your card would be a magnetometer within a couple feet of the register. To their credit, Apple did a really good job making ApplePay a fundamentally very secure way to make a credit card transaction. Loop pay seems about as secure as yelling your credit card info to someone across the room.
That's funny because the first ever phone to support nfc token encrypted was a samsung galaxy nexus using Google wallet
So the merchant still gets to store YOUR Credit Card Number on their terminals?Samsung still doesn't get it...
Samsung had no choice. It's clearly inferior to Apple Pay, but Samsung had no other option. It's exactly like their implementation of fingerprint reader, far inferior to touch id, but they had to come up with something.
Copying is not the same as improving on an existing idea. Tesla didn't copy electric cars. Wal-Mart did not copy the idea of a discount store. Chipotle did not copy the idea of a fast food restaurant.
Neither Apple nor Samsung copied each other on mobile payments because the idea has been out there for a long time. If Samsung created a touch sensor in their home button and used a secure enclave inside a custom-made chip, then there might be a better case for copying. But both sides are searching for the best implementation, and it seems so far that Apple's implementation is better based on their results.
My only concern for the future of mobile payments in general is that certain companies are trying to get into the market with technology that seems to be inherently flawed in terms of the security of the consumer's data.
CurrentC stores at least some personal data on their servers and less than one week after CurrentC came into the public eye a few months ago, their servers were compromised and names and addresses of beta participants were exposed. Not a good start for a company that wants to be in the secure mobile payment business. It was made even worse when the CEO of CurrentC brushed off the breach as something that was inevitable with all the media attention they had been receiving.
From what I can tell, LoopPay stores magstripe data either in a special "LoopPay" case or on the handset itself. I can't tell which it is. This doesn't seem to be particularly secure either.
What concerns me for the future of mobile payments in general is that if these inferior technologies gain even a little bit of traction and then start to have problems with security breaches -- which will, no doubt, be widely publicized -- it may damage the general public's perception of mobile payments as a whole to the point that they don't want to use any mobile payment system.
Even though we know that Apple Pay is inherently more secure than CurrentC or LoopPay, as far as the general public is concerned, perception is reality.
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You mean like a larger screen phone, or a digital watch or a MP3 Player?
Let's be honest, all companies do things other companies have done.
It's the way business is and had been for hundreds of years.
Even if you go back probably 100+ years you will probably find masses of examples of some company does something, it proves popular, so a competing company does something similar to gain sales.
The odd thing is why you think this is unusual.
You would do it, everyone here would do it.
If any of us were in business, and a similar company offered something that sold really well, then why would we ignore the thing the public liked and was buying?
that's business.
If we both make ice cream and you came out with a orange flavour and everyone was going crazy for orange, as a businessman, should I just sit there and do nothing, or should I also bring out my own orange and try and capitalise on the publics new found love of orange.
Please get real this is business.
Such short memories on some posters here... did we already forget that Android phones with NFC and Google Wallet came before Apple Pay and iPhone 6 w/ NFC?
I think we did.
Who's copying who?
I think we did.
Who's copying who?
You do know that NFC payments existed before Apple, right?
This whole mobile phone for payment idea was not Apple's.
Judging by all the upvoted comments, seems lots of people did forget about that.
Shameless copy-cats
Wow! What in the world would Samdung do without Apple indirectly heading their innovation department. Tablets, fingerprint scanner and now cell-phone payments. Didn’t macrumprs run an article about Sammy fingering the thought of entering into the enterprise markets too?
"There's a lot of forgetful confused people.
people who conveniently forget that Google and Samsung both had NFC based payment capabilities for a few years now in some markets."
Ummm, no, we are talking about the specific copying of several items as a whole from Samsung AFTER and only Apple not just the one moble payment thing..
Wow! What in the world would Samdung do without Apple indirectly heading their innovation department. Tablets, fingerprint scanner and now cell-phone payments. Didn’t macrumprs run an article about Sammy fingering the thought of entering into the enterprise markets too?
"There's a lot of forgetful confused people.
people who conveniently forget that Google and Samsung both had NFC based payment capabilities for a few years now in some markets."
Ummm, no, we are talking about the specific copying of several items as a whole from Samsung AFTER and only Apple not just the one moble payment thing..
Uhhhhh... Google and Samsung had cell-phone payments literally for years before Apple developed Apple Pay and added NFC to their phones...
Like, literally, years before Apple.