Apple unveils contactless payments via Tap to Pay on iPhone

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/02/apple-unveils-contactless-payments-via-tap-to-pay-on-iphone/

by todsacerdoti • 4 years ago

847 684 4 years ago

samwillis5• 4 years ago

I'm so pleased to see this happen in a way where its not tied to Apples own payment processor. They could so easily have done that to capture more revenue but I suspect it would have opened up more chance of an anticompetitive lawsuit.

Obviously they are going to vet which processors are allowed, but as a consumer you want that so you can be confident that the iPhone you are tapping your card against isn't skimming your account.

I suspect there is a revenue agreement with the processors allowed on.

jb1991• 4 years ago

*allowed

samwillis5• 4 years ago

Thanks, fixed.

thebean114• 4 years ago

Protection against account skimming should happen on the customer's iPhone (it should only send data allowing a single transaction of a certain size) not the merchant's iPhone. If the customer's iPhone doesn't have that protection it's pretty easy for the merchant to hide a skimmer in their iPhone case / POS system / gas pump.

samwillis5• 4 years ago

It looks like it's not just Apple Pay, it's excepts any card payment, the protection has to be on the merchant's iPhone.

maerF0x0• 4 years ago

If they can assume connectivity it would be best to invert the flow and instead make the Customer receive an invoice ID from the NFC, then work directly with Apple servers to actually pay. Then the Business gets a push notification the invoice was paid.

That way the customer phone never actually sends anything directly to the business, and the only thing sent to the customer is basically public (sure, pay my invoice if you want...)

Skimming happens because you have to enter trusted things into _their_ device w/o any authentication mechanism for the device you're interacting with (the pump).

sabjut• 4 years ago

Clarification due to a somewhat confusing title:

This is about the merchant using an iPhone to accept credit cards and other Tap to Pay devices.

The customer was able to pay with Tap to Pay with their iPhone for a while now.

melling• 4 years ago

The long slow road to contactless payments. Almost 2 decades along in the technology adoption curve.

I was ready for this in 2005.

https://money.howstuffworks.com/personal-finance/debt-manage...

If course as the article points out, it wasn’t even new technology back then:

“ Not Exactly New Tech Mobile introduced the Speedpass in 1997. Speedpass is a small device on a keychain (called a fob) that users wave in front of the Speedpass logo on gas pumps. The cost of the gas is automatically deducted from the user's Speedpass account”

Spivak2• 4 years ago

That’s not at all comparable since you’re not really paying. By that logic we’ve had contactless payments for hundreds of years in the form of opening a tab at a merchant.

jacquesm5• 4 years ago

EU has contactless paying for a while now, but it uses a chip embedded in the bank card.

xeromal• 4 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softcard

I used this payment processor in utah in the early 2010s at Jamba Juices and a few other random places. It was pretty sweet but its name was Isis and that was right around the time Isis started becoming big and I believe they ended up dying off.

TAKEMYMONEY2• 4 years ago

Technically Speedpass was RFID, Apple Pay and most modern tap-to-pay tech uses NFC

kingkawn• 4 years ago

Had speedpass back when it first came out, great technology for the time

zikduruqe• 4 years ago

I remember doing a POC using a Samsung device for NFC ticketing for BART back in 2004.

profmonocle8• 4 years ago

Something I was thinking about the other day is how some modern credit cards technically have four different ways to pay. Swiping pressure-sensitive paper over the raised numbers (the original method) is still possible, though I haven't seen a merchant actually do this since maybe the mid-2000's. Then you have magstripe, chip, and RFID all in the same card.

Pretty impressive backwards compatibility, although I think the original copy-to-paper mechanism is finally being phased out, since some new credit cards no longer have raised digits. (My new Visa from Chase has the digits on the back, and they're only slightly embossed and not in the same place. Probably wouldn't work with the old swipers.)

I wonder how long until magstripe is phased out?

beambot• 4 years ago

PayPal was founded on this premise in 1998: Contactless payments through Palm Pilots. Wasn't a new idea at that time either.

seanmcdirmid5• 4 years ago

When I visited Australia in 2015, I was really impressed with the ubiquity and speed of TAP to pay. We aren't quite their in the USA yet, but I do 90% of my payments outside using my Apple watch (with a bit of a lag that I didn't see in Aus). At least we aren't stuck using QR codes.

peoplefromibiza2• 4 years ago

In Italy RFID payments have been a thing since 1989

Unfortunately this is one of those cases where being among early adopters wasn't an advantage, in many areas of Italy cash is still the only viable payment method.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telepass

baxtr2• 4 years ago

I worked in the mobile industry back in 2010s. Every carrier had big shiny projects called "mobile payments" going on. They were exploring, together with banking partners how they could revolutionize contactless payments.

A key factor why all these project failed wasn't the technology. As you rightly point out, the technology was already available back then. It was mainly the vast differences in business models in the two industries: telcos and banking. The telcos were spoiled back then and expected any service to deliver a margin of at least 30%. Banks operated on a very different operating margin for the transactions. They never got that reconciled.

I remember back when Apple introduced Apple Pay many people were stunned by how little they charged. But in the end, that was their key insight to make this work. Quite impressive from a company with very high margins on their core products.

dathinab4• 4 years ago

If Apple wouldn't have effectively crippler innovation by not providing NFC (and later one locking it down) we probably would have contact less payment and many other similar services by now everywhere.

I know of multiple pilot projects and startups which where basically killed (or majorly revamped) because just supporting Android wasn't viable and Apples not showing any intention to support NFC.

The fact that the NFC we have now is missing a major feature of original NFC isn't helping either (the ability to act as a NFC card if the device it's embedded in is powered of/out of battery).

jiggawatts• 4 years ago

I haven’t used cash in Australia in about 5 years, maybe longer.

danShumway3• 4 years ago

Thanks, I was actually pretty confused by this at first glance.

As a non-Apple-user I've never personally used the feature, but I still thought that stuff like Tap to Pay was a somewhat large selling point for the Apple Watch. So for a second I wondered if I had just been drastically misunderstanding how that worked for a long time and had somehow never actually checked/verified that iPhones/Watch could do that.

dkonofalski3• 4 years ago

I use it nearly every day and definitely for almost every purchase I make. I no longer carry around a wallet now that digital IDs are a thing and have only had 1 situation in the last 6 months where I needed a physical card because they had TTP disabled on their terminal.

tut-urut-utut• 4 years ago

I honestly don't see what's so revolutionary about this. Why would anyone shell out multiple hundreds of € when a device that accepts payments can be purchased for a fraction of the iPhone price?

E.g the most expensive device here [1] is only 120 €, and it can also print the bill. The cheapest that does the job is a mere 20 €.

tluyben22• 4 years ago

Well, if you already have an iPhone ? I would assume this is for small vendors? Otherwise indeed I do not see the point.

stu2b503• 4 years ago

Because a lot of people, going by the sales numbers, have iPhones? It’s more for very small businesses, who just need a quick and easy way to take card payments. Larger outfits will naturally invest in “real” PoS devices.

dogma1138• 4 years ago

Because you still usually need a mobile device the modern cashless till today is an iPad with an NFC dongle to take payments now you can skip the dongle..

Nextgrid• 4 years ago

The UX of an iPhone is much better than most legacy card terminals and as others have said, many people already own one and thus wouldn't need anything other than installing an app.

dbbk• 4 years ago

If you already have an iPhone you don't need to buy an extra device, obviously.

numpad03• 4 years ago

€120 for a CC processing terminal with the fees for setup? Doubt it. That’s the price of that little printer alone. Else they’ll be paying them back in processing fees.

amelius• 4 years ago

Not only that, but also the potential for lock-in should be a reason to not use this.

bladegash• 4 years ago

You haven’t seen businesses using things like Square on an iPad or iPhone as a pseudo POS system? Square even has a contactless reader on the Apple Store. Presumably, now businesses do not have to use those third parties anymore.

sithadmin3• 4 years ago

American merchants doing low customer volume (e.g. small shop, cafe, restaurant) are usually locked into using something like a terminal from First Data (~$150-200 USD minimum for the most basic device) and something in the ballpark of 2.2% to 2.7% in fees for every transaction. People paying the lower rate are doing over $50k per month in transaction volume.

Compare that to competitors in the space like Square, which costs ~$300 USD and charges ~2.6% plus a flat 10 cents per transaction.

If you're not doing over $50k in volume per month and already have an iPhone...you might as well just use the Square app and take NFC payments on your phone instead of investing in the reader (assuming you're operating in a space where consumers will readily have NFC payments ready).

XCSme• 4 years ago

AFAIK and from my experience in many counteris PoS terminals are pretty expensive + they require you to have a constant cash flow otherwise they take it from you.

m348e912• 4 years ago

So basically apple is trying to move into square’s business model? What about chips and swiping? Will apple provide a solution for that?

oliyoung• 4 years ago

Square's hardware business model, they'll just be a software company now

anonymouse008• 4 years ago

The real news is Apple specifically took a non competitive stance — making the API available to third parties like Stripe - rather than building in house, leveraging Apple Card connections, or similar

artursapek• 4 years ago

They probably don't want any more anti-competitive criticism right now.

monkeynotes3• 4 years ago

I am surprised Apple didn't make this a closed system and compete with Square for small businesses.

dzhiurgis6• 4 years ago

Not that we know of yet.

zumu• 4 years ago

They can always take a competitive stance later, once small businesses have gotten rid of all their PoS hardware. This makes that initial adoption much easier.

WatchDog• 4 years ago

Presumably, in order to become an approved partner, you need to pay a kickback to apple.

ec109685• 4 years ago

Apple relies on payment processors for ApplePay as well, so this is normal.

kazanins2• 4 years ago

Hey! Apple Card is also a partnership (with Goldman Sachs). Goldman is not in acquiring business, so Apple had to find another partner

deepsun• 4 years ago

Android had that, just yesterday a merchant accepted my payment.

96stanleylee• 4 years ago

I was shocked reading the title thinking 'No way this isn't already on Apple devices'.

hestefisk• 4 years ago

The right title would be “contactless collections”.

jeffbee• 4 years ago

I wonder what role GS, the Apple Pay backend, has in this, if they are involved at all.

minhazm• 4 years ago

GS is the backend for Apple Card. Is it also the backend for Apple Pay? I don't think I've seen any evidence of that. I also don't see why Apple would need GS for that. Each bank needs to support Apple Pay, and Apple likely just integrates directly with Visa, Mastercard, Amex, etc.

NovemberWhiskey2• 4 years ago

Apple Pay is a Apple->payments-network; Apple Card is payments-network->GS/Apple. Apple Pay with Apple Card is the two tromboned together.

MBCook2• 4 years ago

I’m guessing none. It sounds like software developers will have to bring their own CC processing for this, not that it will use some centralized Apple designated processor.

knaik94• 4 years ago

That's a pretty awesome way of letting iphones start to replace POS terminals. It's been done before through add on and swiping, but the major cc companies are phasing out swiping. And the real play is introducing this into an iPad at some point. An iPhone is handy day to day and great for small run produce markets, but it's been a long while since I have gone to restaurants around my college campus that didn't have an ipad or tablet for paying.

dhosek• 4 years ago

I'm surprised that the iPad isn't being supported for this.

jurmous4• 4 years ago

While iPads have NFC chips none of the released iPads have an NFC antenna.

https://9to5mac.com/2014/10/24/nfc-ipad-air-2-secure-element...

MBCook2• 4 years ago

Do they have the NFC hardware iPhones do?

Maybe because of this they will add it to new iPads going forward.

axg113• 4 years ago

Three interesting implications from this press release:

- Stripe as the first user of the SDK vs Square: For any small business starting this spring, I can't think of a reason why they wouldn't use and iPhone+Stripe to start off. Zero hardware cost (assuming they have an iPhone), no need to wait for hardware delivery.

- NFC will be coming to the iPad.

- The ability to keep the same hardware but switch payment network lowers switching cost for small businesses. Payment platforms will have to differentiate on ecosystem as well as cost.

SOLAR_FIELDS2• 4 years ago

Presumably companies like Square and Clover are selling their own POS hardware and probably are less than happy that every iPad and iPhone running latest OS with NFC is now a competitor to their hardware. Stripe does not make hardware (as far as I’m aware) so this initial partnership makes sense.

mojzu• 4 years ago

I'd imagine for these companies the hardware is a necessity to get customers into their payment processing business, could even be a loss leader rather then a profit centre. If a lot more people now have a potential POS device in their pocket it could expand their markets quite a bit, although other payment processors who formerly didn't want to or couldn't make hardware may now become competitors

ritwikr• 4 years ago

Stripe does have a physical terminal too (https://stripe.com/terminal) but I've never seen it at a merchant.

scarface743• 4 years ago

No software company wants to sell hardware outside of Apple. They only do so when forced to support their services. Software scales with a marginal cost of $0 and is much less messy.

Before smart phones and generic hardware was a thing, I worked at a company that wrote software for field services (“sending people places to do things”) we had to resell and maintain custom ruggedized windows mobile devices, mobile satellite receivers (cell phone data wasn’t reliable), etc. We were glad to transition to generic smart phones. At later jobs, when I worked in the same space, we used generic Samsung Android tablets.

Microsoft doesn’t even really care if you buy an XBox, it’s a loss leader. They would be more than happy if you bought their subscription gaming service and ran it on someone else’s hardware.

tonightstoast• 4 years ago

Stripe’s fees are pretty high though so that is certainly one reason small businesses may avoid it. Sounds like Apple is adding more processors soon though so it will be interesting to see how the space places out.

snotrockets3• 4 years ago

A small business is low volume, hence going to have a hard time getting good rates. And they're also constrainted on resources, so the extra effort to get a few points off may cost more than those points (as written above – they're low volume. The cash value for a bp is much lower for them than for a high volume business)

joshstrange6• 4 years ago

I imagine this is going to built on top of the existing Apple Pay infrastructure which means any payment provider that works with Apple Pay will probably (eventually) work with this. There are a good number of places that work with Apple Pay.

joshvm2• 4 years ago

There are established people in this space with very easy to setup solutions, like Zettle (PayPal) for example - who also offer connected receipt printers, barcode scanners, tablet/phone terminals and integrations with ecommerce, accounting and so on. The only real advantage I can see Apple having is if they charged a lower transaction fee, but it's going through Stripe, so no - 2.9 % + 30c versus 1.75 %. I don't think waiting for hardware is a major factor - you can get a terminal shipped next day if you want.

I mention Zettle because it's hugely popular in the UK. A lot of market traders use them, which has probably saved a lot of businesses that would traditionally be cash-only. COVID has helped to encourage cashless purchasing too. Europe generally has always been pretty ahead with contactless payments (Zettle was a Swedish fintech before PayPal bought them).

axg113• 4 years ago

Stripe might lower their rates for Tap to Pay. I also think you underestimate the friction of getting extra hardware for a small business and the advantage of using hardware you already have (iPhone).

alwillis12• 4 years ago

This is also going allow trivially easy bitcoin payments at some point: https://9to5mac.com/2021/12/28/comment-tim-cook-said-apple-i...

asd88• 4 years ago

I believe SQ most basic card reader is free, so hardware cost is not really a competitive advantage here.

poxrud• 4 years ago

Wait until small businesses discover that Stripe keeps the full 3-4% fee even when issuing refunds. This makes Stripe unsuitable for many types of small business, like clothing or electronics stores where customers are accustomed to be able to purchase items with the intention of returning all or a portion of the order. Square does NOT charge this fee, which makes it a much better option.

reffaelwallen• 4 years ago

Impactful to Square?

0des2• 4 years ago

Square is a different market segment, more of the first year, trendy-but-still-playskool retail merchant setup.

ra7• 4 years ago

Could you expand how Square is different market segment? I thought POS terminal was one of their primary products.

verst2• 4 years ago

At my local farmers market every vendor uses Square to accept payments, but also seems to have iPhones themselves.

With this announcement I can very much see Square being removed from the equation in this small business without fixed store front scenario.

iamacyborg4• 4 years ago

Maybe, depending on how much of their revenue comes from hardware sales.

Eventually they'll just be an app that runs on the phone, making it significantly easier for a business to signup to use their service.

lucioperca• 4 years ago

Let me guess, 30% goes to apple when you do that?

paradite• 4 years ago

The technical term for the cut is called Merchant Discount Rate (MDR). It's usually 1-3%.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/merchant-discount-rate....

I'm not sure what's the exact revenue share model / contractual agreements between Apple and its partner payment platforms(Stripe, etc).

ab_testing• 4 years ago

So, is Apple -> Stripe now ?

duxup4• 4 years ago

Kinda weird.

If a rando retail person pulls out their iPhone and asks me to tap... that's kinda strange in my mind. Something about "how do I know that isn't their personal phone?" would pop in my head.

But things that seem awkward can become commonplace.

llampx• 4 years ago

Even now, they can use a Square wireless terminal and you wouldn't know if its hooked up to their personal iPhone or what.

duxup4• 4 years ago

Absolutely true.... just seems like a mounted device like they usually are seem more 'official'.

aloe_falsa• 4 years ago

When I pay with cash, I don't usually worry that the salesperson will put it in their own pocket. If they choose to be dishonest, that's between them and their employer.

parkingrift• 4 years ago

People use their personal phones with Stripe, Square, and Venmo. The only difference here is the lack of a terminal. It’s ultimately processed the same way.

bentcorner• 4 years ago

I agree - you'd hope that retailers would use cases or accessories that say "this is not a personal phone". I think I've seen employees at big retailers like Best Buy carry around devices that look like smartphones but have ergonomics more suited for retail (large black cases, belt holsters, attached receipt printer, etc.).

Like a work uniform, it doesn't really serve any immediate purpose but it gives the transaction authenticity.

duxup4• 4 years ago

Yeah even a funky case would kinda change that perception I think.

wil421• 4 years ago

I pay for house cleaning via Venmo. I’ve also paid for some other work via Venmo including landscaping, tree service, and HVAC work. It’s all from small business owners who use their personal phones.

iamacyborg4• 4 years ago

I was working for a company that was working on this sort of device a couple years ago and that was definitely the feedback we received in early UX trials.

tantalor4• 4 years ago

how do I know that isn't their personal phone?

Why would that be a concern to you?

Either way you pay, get receipt, take your goods, and leave. It's not like you are stealing.

Are you worried the clerk would MITM your payment and leave you without normal return/refund policy, since it wasn't a legit transaction?

duxup4• 4 years ago

I'm less concerned about anything complex and more about just paying the right folks.

jedberg5• 4 years ago

If a random disheveled looking person comes up to you in the middle of a store and says "I can take your cash and give you a receipt", and they they show you a legit looking receipt, do you feel that it would be ok to give them money and take the receipt?

Sure, it's the store's job to make sure people aren't impersonating their employees and stealing their receipt papers, so that's on them right?

mortenjorck• 4 years ago

I tend to imagine most users of this feature will be individual owner-operators such as a seller at a farmer's market, so the distinction between their personal phone and a business POS terminal may be fuzzy to start with.

vmception4• 4 years ago

why does that question matter, at all?

The Apple system is not set up to skim either way, and if they have a good or service you want, just go through the motions. This is as secure as it gets.

zjaffee• 4 years ago

The prime example I can think of where this makes sense is if you're going to get a haircut, it allows the barber to not need to buy a square attachment for the iphone they already have.

joshstrange6• 4 years ago

I have to say this is the worst scam someone could consider pulling. Payment processors (of which you will need one to use this) do KYC and it wouldn't take long at all to get caught and tracked back to whoever is doing it.

gandalfian• 4 years ago

Whinge: but the term "Tap to Pay" winds me up. "Hover to Pay" maybe, or "Contactless" makes sense. But tap the card reader with your card and you disturb the touchscreen and cancel the payment. Don't tap it's a trick.

hunter2_4• 4 years ago

Yeah, I never understood why "tap" and "contactless" became synonymous in this context, given that "tap" is an onomatopoeia for the sound of two objects making contact.

Is it possible that "contactless" actually refers to lack of electrical contacts (i.e., not using the gold pads)? We already have plenty of words for this idea: radio, wireless, inductive. Or is the intent to mean no physical contact whatsoever such that a tap would only be accidental?

bluk• 4 years ago

For most people, I bet it's more of a marketing term. When people hear "contactless", they might think that someone can steal your credit card number or charge you just by being in the same area.

numpad03• 4 years ago

It’s not of both; significance of contactless technology that are used in Tap to [__] is that they require neither electrical nor physical connections. There are other RF-based technologies that require no conductive surfaces but some sort of mechanical touches.

The reason why the users are instructed to slam the card or device is because users fail to perform required actions if simply told to hold the card or phones just right. Spatial cognition isn’t a forte for many.

The reason why tap is used in VISA contactless over touch is probably because Suica system used by JR East uses the phrase “Suica is touch 1-second”.

joshvm2• 4 years ago

It's physically easier to touch the reader than to hover over it? Especially if the reader is a bit janky/older and takes time to complete the transaction. If you look at Oyster (TFL) for example, most people physically touch their cards to the turnstile/bus readers. The official advertising also uses the phrase "tap in, tap out" for stations where there are no barriers. "Contactless" is also fairly widely used in the UK - e.g. "do you take contactless?". Contactless is because in theory you don't need to touch your card to the reader. My new phone seems to have a good enough antenna (active?) that it triggers the POS terminal much further away than my debit card, but usually the activation distance is small enough that tapping is easier.

banana_giraffe• 4 years ago

Well, "Hover around hunting for the NFC antenna" is less catchy than "Tap to Pay".

I always assumed the term tap to pay caught on since the early EFTPOS terminals had the NFC antenna in a separate portion of the terminal, or under a non-touchscreen panel, so the tap of a credit card wasn't detrimental to the user experience, and now we're stuck with the term.

exikyut9• 4 years ago

To me "tap to pay" encodes immediate-term incidentality and proximity.

It's three syllables, it rolls off the tongue when you say it, it takes maybe 450ms to speak, and the brain can encode it using similar (or maybe the same?) mechanisms to how brand names and word combinations are captured without parsing/questioning when very young. This is one of many factors that contributes to a sort of "flow" that combats the "oooooooooh that sounds complicated"-of-death that stands to kill new complex digital products that need to be adopted en mass to function.

"Tap" also encodes "move near reader" but does so by suggesting that you move too close. Thus you'll either have people moving well within the active area (at which point the transaction may even be able to start and complete by the time it's been tapped). It's also physically easier for me to physically execute "tap object against other object" than "hover object 1cm in front of other object", especially when moving.

If you want something to scale, you need fail-safe design. My local bus transit system has a giant (but featureless) NFC pad with a screen saying "Tap here " above it. The number of people I see tapping the screen is... the screen should obviously say "below", the active area should have a ring of LEDs around it, etc etc etc; it's broken design. However, I've also seen people doing the same thing (tapping the screen) with payment terminals. In situations like this, you're designing the system to be viable for the dumbest user.

rootusrootus5• 4 years ago

For all practical purposes, though, it's a tap for most people. What's the limit on NFC? 1.5 inches? At least half of everyone that uses it will inadvertently hit the screen anyway. The UI should be designed with that expectation IMO.

BenjiWiebe3• 4 years ago

I do tap to pay, though. Contactless as in no electrical contacts and no human-to-human contacts.

losvedir• 4 years ago

Is this only for merchants? I feel like here in the US we still don't have a great way to send money back and forth with friends and family. Zelle is decent if both parties' banks support it, but otherwise I've tried Google Pay, Paypal, Venmo, and they all have some problem or another. A lot of them (I'm looking at you PayPal) require you to give them your bank username and password!

eightysixfour• 4 years ago

You can send money using Apple Pay, but most of these free money transfer applications are free because they’re using ACH, so they “need” access to the bank account to see if the underlying funds are there.

If they transact like a credit card processor, there are fees.

This is setup so that you can run an existing merchant app (launching with Stripe) and collect money with all of the same fee requirements as using stripe normally.

twobitshifter2• 4 years ago

The press release includes mention of solopreneurs but nothing about friends and family, so i think there must be some business angle to it.

floatingatoll• 4 years ago

There’s many debit card “send to friend” apps that fill this space, including Apple Cash and Square Cash and etc. but your most likely compatibility app is Venmo. I’ve had zero issues with any of the Cash apps I’ve used to date, though.

kencausey• 4 years ago

Regarding your allegation about Paypal, are you outside of the US? I ask simply because I am in the US and have never had to provide a username or password to my bank account to Paypal. I do have a bank account linked but it was done simply by Paypal making two small deposits to my account and then withdrawing them and asking me to tell them the amounts of the transactions. Given, this was many years ago, but I would be surprised to learn that this has changed.

edit: typo

jjice2• 4 years ago

Had the same process on PayPal 2 years ago, so at least that recently it's still the case.

nerdjon• 4 years ago

I could have sworn there was something about being able to hold 2 iPhones together to initiate sharing something with Apple Pay to a friend.

That being said, I use Apple Pay all the time to send money between my partner and me. It is tied to iMessage but since we are always texting anyways it is super convenient. But the convenience may largely be due to already having my payment information as part of Apple Pay to begin with. But it just uses my debit card to send money, it doesn't need access to my bank account.

lotsofpulp5• 4 years ago

I wonder how many bank account holders are not part of Zelle. Based on the list of banks, it seems like it must cover a good majority of people.

toomuchtodo2• 4 years ago

Roughly 140 million customers have bank accounts that support Zelle. The network does about $500B in volume annually.

FedNow instant payments will provide coverage for all US banks within 2-3 years.

vmception4• 4 years ago

I don't like Zelle because I like using a credit card and accumulating credit card points.

so its a non-starter for me.

although one time I did a chargeback on a Venmo transaction, and Venmo banned me. that was an inconvenient few months before I maybe tricked their system. maybe as in I'm not sure they are just tolerating me.

rootusrootus5• 4 years ago

But Zelle, Venmo, and similar are cash apps...? Why would you want to pay a 3% credit card fee per transaction just so you could accumulate a couple credit card points?

joshstrange6• 4 years ago

If I had to guess this will reuse their Apple Pay Merchant IDs, or at least I'm really hoping that's the case. If so any iOS dev that sets that up could use this (and has a payment processor to work with).

kevinsundar• 4 years ago

Hopefully FedNow will come out soon and be usable, backed by the US government: FedNow https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow/about....

numbsafari2• 4 years ago

It'll be fascinating to see if/when/how this rolls out internationally, which isn't mentioned at all in the article.

rvz• 4 years ago

I guess it was a good thing that Square had to move quickly, Since Stripe threw the gauntlet at them for just the reader [0] (If you don't have an iPhone).

Now they are directly allowing payments from the phone. No need for readers at all. Next will be the iPad as the integrated terminal with NFC and no external equipment.

But there remains the next one. Cryptocurrency payments which both of them are still in.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27534927

TIPSIO2• 4 years ago

I would really like to see it become normal for tipping people this way (that isn't at a cash register / tap) but with AirDrop.

For example, I recently had movers. I went out of my way to get a cash tip for them earlier. It would have been nice to skip that and just ping it at them somehow without awkwardly saying "Hey friend do you have Venmo? Apple Pay? CashApp? I'd like to tip you. What's your phone number?! Let me get that, thanks, bye, delete.".

This is NFC and a bit different but just my thoughts.

hn_throwaway_693• 4 years ago

Eh, I hope it doesn't. Tipping needs to die out. I'd prefer to have the moving company pay the movers a living wage such that a tip would be unnecessary and politely refused.

ludamad• 4 years ago

I'd rather an industry standard payout, but the workers getting pay proportional to revenue is actually not a bad model. I just hate the analysis paralysis

TIPSIO2• 4 years ago

This is obviously a bit flame-y / unrelated / political.

Regardless of how you personally feel about US wages and the 20% I already prepaid for tip through the company to them, to be able to send money to others would be useful.

There could be other cases besides tipping.

exikyut9• 4 years ago

I'd be really interested to know what to properly call it, but IMHO this is the kind of thing that the market will never solve top-down because the structure of the relationship would never support it.

I think an on-the-ground solution that caters to the long tail would be the only thing that would basically survive. Everything else would succumb to social forces and basically just fizzle out.

AirDropping Apple credit could be an interesting pilot study, but I doubt Apple would do something like that sadly :/

skeeter20202• 4 years ago

Please don't confuse the restaurant industry where tips subsidize wages with the original idea of tipping as a sign of gratitude an thanks. A tip can be a meaningful and impactful way to say "You went beyond expectation, did an awesome job and I really appreciate it". Why would you not want that option?

reaperducer5• 4 years ago

I'd prefer to have the moving company pay the movers a living wage such that a tip would be unnecessary and politely refused.

Clearly, you have no idea of how the moving industry works. Everybody's a contractor of a contractor of a franchisee. The person who picks up your stuff is not always the person who delivers it.

When I move (frequently), I make sure to tip each person packing my stuff $50, each person loading my stuff $50, and the driver $100 for < 1,000 miles, or $200 > 2,000 miles.

Lifting and carrying and handling other people's prized possessions isn't an easy job. This is how I show appreciation when the job is done well.

jjice2• 4 years ago

While true that that could be nice, I don't think the burden of asking for an alternative like Venmo or CashApp like you listed is that high, and this case requires that the movers would also have an iPhone.

yuuu• 4 years ago

I had movers a couple months ago and tried to tip them. Note that I don't ever carry cash and am a proponent of abolishing the Federal Reserve. I asked them for their Ethereum or Bitcoin address, and they said, "neither of us don't have that, but we take cash." I calmly tried to explain to them the evils of the Federal Reserve for around five minutes, then began to set them up with their own cryptocurrency wallets on their phones. I then plugged in my Ledger Nano S and had them each read me their public keys, which I entered into Ledger Live and sent them each their five dollar tip. It was a simple process and did not take longer than thirty minutes. By the end of the exchange, they were both very happy with the arrangement and thanked me profusely for setting them up to use the future of currency, although I was still in the process of explaining its importance.

"Teach a man to fish," they say, and I believe I did it on that day. I encourage everyone else to do the same.

WillPostForFood• 4 years ago

set them up with their own cryptocurrency wallets on their phones

What specifically did you have them set up?

mike1o1• 4 years ago

I can't tell if this is satire or not.

cruano• 4 years ago

Anon needs to move to El Salvador

skeeter20202• 4 years ago

> I calmly tried to explain to them the evils of the Federal Reserve for around five minutes ... > sent them each their five dollar tip ... > It was a simple process and did not take longer than thirty minutes.

This is satire, right?

have_faith• 4 years ago

Great copypasta material.

ctime• 4 years ago

Bravo

alexkoeh• 4 years ago

This is art

danShumway3• 4 years ago

I love this analogy[0], but to play devil's advocate I do a lot of tipping in cash and it's kind of a pain to break down big bills, so I can see some benefits to normalizing more digital options that actually work.

My bank is digital, it doesn't have a local branch, and most ATMs around me dispense cash in $20 bills. So I can make a small purchase near the ATM if it's in a shop and then ask them to give me change in smaller bills, but usually there's nothing I want. I don't have a local branch to drive to, but maybe other banks would help split bills? It's not awful, but it is pretty inconvenient.

Of course, the way to fix that might not be for everyone to standardize on iPhones, it might be to just have more ATMs that dispense smaller bills. But I do see why someone would find tipping primarily over, say, Venmo preferable, even though I don't think that appeal is enough to outweigh the benefits of cash tips (privacy, universal compatibility, simplicity, etc) in many situations.

Or I could just start tipping everyone everywhere in increments of $20 bills I guess, but I'm not that generous.

----

[0]: assuming you did actually mean it as an analogy for dropping cash for digital payments

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 4 years ago

I can vouch for that story.

I also had movers, and wanted to tip them. When I asked what they took. I was shocked when they said Bitcoin!

They said some person that they had helped move before had helped them set up bitcoin addresses.

They were so excited by this. It was also pretty easy to convince them to read me both their public and private keys for those addresses (I told them that if I sent it to their public key, it would be public so their boss and the IRS would find out, however, if they gave me the private key, it would be completely private).

I then tipped both of them $50. They were so overjoyed.

Then later that night, I emptied both of their wallets.

(By the way, to the OP, thanks for teaching them about cryptocurrency, and for the $10).

/s just in case anybody is confused

AnonHP• 4 years ago

This would’ve been a lot more convincing if you’d stated the transaction fees for the $5 tips. :)

soheil• 4 years ago

So how does not carrying cash equate to getting rid of the Fed? You know it's not the money printed on paper that matters, but the actual number in a database?

Let's not turn hn into a discord channel about how crypto is going to disrupt all the things and make them more "decentralized" by having "federated exchanges" that allow you to "stake" your assets where, otherwise, it would be impossible to form a "liquidity provider" since, of course, without it why would you even want to live.

glitchc• 4 years ago

This is offensive. They would have to wait at least a day for their transaction to be settled on the chain.

numbsafari2• 4 years ago

You tipped movers $5 and stole their time from them so you could play with your toys.

I'm surprised all you got was a "Bless you, bless you" response and not a shiv or a fist sandwich.

kilroy123• 4 years ago

Here in London tons of people and places have pay touch readers like this:

https://imgur.com/nNaDddR

I'm talking museums asking for donations. To street performers in the tube. They're everywhere.

benbristow• 4 years ago

The lollipop and aftershave man in my local nightclub's toilet has one. I'm tempted to give him a pound next time to see what pops up on my bank statement (and for some probably counterfeit cologne).

For context: I don't know if they're a thing in the States but in most male toilets in nightclubs (and more 'clubby' bars) in the UK there's usually an annoying guy in the toilet who turns off the hand driers and gives you paper to dry your hands whilst passively aggresively demanding a tip in return for a lollipop or a spray of various aftershaves/deoderants.

londons_explore• 4 years ago

Indeed - I'm really surprised that Apple doesn't have some kind of "just pay another apple user" feature.

I know that would open them up to lots of KYC requirements, as well as require them to do some of the evil things that financial laws require (eg. tracking all payments, closing accounts and banning users for certain things while not being able to tell the users why, freezing users money till they can present documents they don't have, etc.)

But it still seems worth it to take over the payments space from venmo, cashapp and paypal, make the wall to switching to android a little taller, etc.

thefreeman• 4 years ago

They do support this in iMessage, it's called Apple Cash. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207875

dumbfounder• 4 years ago

I have seen this solved at a bar with a QR code linked to venmo.

dzhiurgis6• 4 years ago

iPhone needs a little printer that prints a QR code that represents an NFT that was just minted in blockchain

reaperducer5• 4 years ago

I would really like to see it become normal for tipping people this way (that isn't at a cash register / tap) but with AirDrop.

I totally agree.

At a parking garage the other day, there was a long line of people trying to get their cars back from the valets because one person was trying to tip with some random app.

"Oh, you need to download this. Yeah, open the App Store. Then download it. Yeah, it take a while. OK, now sign up. --five minutes elapse-- OK, now what's your username so I can send you the money? Did you say 'e' or 'v?' Was that '4114' or '1144?' OK. Sending now..."

It took like ten minutes.

twobitshifter2• 4 years ago

It notes that it’s supported iPhone XS or later - what feature was added to the XS that is not in the X? When Apple names the “pro” model like this does it mean that the XR from the same generation is not supported?

CharlesW• 4 years ago

Possibly this? https://9to5mac.com/2018/09/12/iphone-xs-and-iphone-xr-can-r...

numpad03• 4 years ago

8 Global/7 JP and later has FeliCa secure element; checkm8 exploit works up to X. It’s a fine thinking to not accept secure transaction originating a potentially jailbroken device; perhaps that’s why?

exikyut9• 4 years ago

I was wondering about that too. I wonder how much SecureROM extraction pays nowadays? It used to be $200k circa 2015: https://ramtin-amin.fr/#nvmedma

(Interim while the above URL currently doesn't work: https://web.archive.org/web/20200217151824/http://ramtin-ami...)

exikyut9• 4 years ago

I too would be extremely interested to know this. The sibling comment referring to NFC looks interesting, but I can't help but think there's an extra dimension or two.

I thought most bank cards used RFID per se as opposed to full NFC.

Plus (and much more significantly) there's the fact that the phone is doing the magic voodoo sekret handshake thing that has been the stomping ground of credit card terminals for only the past two decades or so.

My understanding was that Apple Pay stuck Apple in the middle as an intermediary to the payment, which was internally settled via backend servers. I *think*. I don't think the phones behave as credit cards in the strictest sense - my (pulled out of thin air) guesstimate is that it emulates a credit card to the extent that it make the payment terminal happy, but in such a way that the actual payment settlement is done out of band. Or... something.

Hmmmm, maybe something similar is going on here, where the phone talks the protocol but not strictly exactly the way a payment terminal would, such that Apple ultimately intermediates the final settlement of the transaction.

I feel super dumb here, mostly because this whole world is (sigh very understandably) clandestine. I would be very interested to learn about any high-level "oh okay!" type info on the subject that might be out there!

edf13• 4 years ago

tiffanyh3• 4 years ago

This is the outcome of Apple's 2020 acquisition of Mobeewave.

https://www.pymnts.com/apple/2020/apple-buys-mobeewave-for-1...

It essentially turns an iOS device into a POS system.

Apple already gets 15 bps for all Apple Pay transactions. I'm curious to hear the additional monetization Apple plans to get for this.

pilsetnieks• 4 years ago

Apple already gets 15 bps for all Apple Pay transactions

Bits per second? Beets per sale? Blackened pieces-of-eight per scurvy-rat?

atlbeer• 4 years ago

Basis points

thesimon• 4 years ago

Basis points

mlyle• 4 years ago

Basis points-- hundredths of a percent. so 0.15%.

runeks2• 4 years ago

Beets per sale

exikyut9• 4 years ago

I was wondering how this was done.

How on earth was what amounted to a userspace app able to talk to the NFC hardware to the extent necessary to process payments?!

Presumably the app received the relevant entitlements to be able to do this...?

How on earth was it done securely, within the Mobeewave app?

Rafert• 4 years ago

The PCI Security Standards Council has been working on the Secure PIN on COTS (SPoC) standard for a few years: https://blog.pcisecuritystandards.org/new-pci-software-pin-e...

kyawzazaw3• 4 years ago

Check this out as well from Visa.

Disclaimer: I worked/work on this https://usa.visa.com/about-visa/newsroom/press-releases.rele...

msoad• 4 years ago

Not all iOS devices have NFC. This is an iPhone-only feature

dzhiurgis6• 4 years ago

MacBooks strangely doesn't have NFC - IMO it's ultimate solution for U2F.

alwillis12• 4 years ago

iPhone XS or newer.

judge20203• 4 years ago

I'm curious to hear the additional monetization Apple plans to get for this.

I don't think there will be any extra monetization - this is presumably just an API in a future iOS 15.x that can be enabled via entitlements Apple assigns, so unless Stripe says "extra 0.3% fee for iPhone PoS payments" they likely won't make any money from it. Think of it as a funnel for getting the last 20% of businesses to accept Apple Pay.

tiffanyh3• 4 years ago

"getting ... businesses to accept Apple Pay"

This isn't just Apple Pay. You can tap your plastic credit card to pay using this. This is all contactless transactions, not just Apple Pay.

kingcharles• 4 years ago

They at least move some small retail owners from Android to iPhone, so they'll sell some iPhones.

KoftaBob• 4 years ago

If "bps" is supposed to stand for basis points, then you're saying they get a 0.15% cut?

tiffanyh3• 4 years ago

Correct.

https://www.pymnts.com/in-depth/2015/apple-pays-business-mod...

throw7• 4 years ago

Can it receive contactless payment from android phones (e.g. google pay)?

staplung• 4 years ago

I was using my phone for contactless pay but stopped during the pandemic because I realized it was more cumbersome than using a credit card to do the same thing. The phone tries to scan my face, fails because of the mask, then just waits for a hot second to see if my face might change shape, then prompts for a password. With the credit card, I just swipe it over the reader and I'm done.

bobbylarrybobby2• 4 years ago

Thankfully in iOS 15.4 (currently in beta), Face ID works with a mask on by scanning the shit out of your orbital bones

ketzo• 4 years ago

Woah, really? That's super exciting.

verst2• 4 years ago

You can configure your iPhone not to use FaceID for Apple Pay only. That's what I did for the same reason as you. I just quickly enter my PIN to use Apple Pay.

pornel• 4 years ago

You can use a contactless physical card too. No need to use an outdated insecure mag strip.

Apple-style solution to this is to buy Apple Watch which authorizes payments without face scanning.

macintux• 4 years ago

I use my Watch, which is almost always simpler even without a mask.

However, you should be able to hurry it along to prompt for a password. Apple doesn’t make it easily discoverable, but if you tap on the status message when it’s trying to decide whether it recognizes you, it will prompt you for a password instead (while logging in, and I imagine during Apple Pay as well).

johnwalkr• 4 years ago

This seems pretty nice for small retailers.

Apple pay is not a big improvement on normal tap to pay, although it still feels cool 5 years later to pay for stuff using my watch. The gamechanger exceptions are:

- Transit. I can use my watch/apple pay for transit in many cities. From experience, I have only used it in 2 cities. Slow and annoying in Vancouver, but much less annoying than the alternatives. In Japan, instant and more convenient than using my suica card or suica function of my phone. Back in 2016 I bought an Apple watch within hours of learning that it supported suica. The only slight inconvenience is that I prefer to wear my watch on my left hand, and the card reader at gates is always on the right.

- Online commerce. Only twice have I had the good fortune of finding something I wanted to buy online available using apple pay. But wow, was it a good experience. No login[1], no entering my address or details. Just approve apple pay by fingerprint or faceid, confirm my address, and wait for the goods to arrive.

[1] I have a common name, and an email address several dozen people think they own. Making a new account on any site/service is a nightmare. If I can even make an account, Logging in 1 year later is usually impossible because someone has tried to reset "their" password 50 times. Fixing an account on any service that profits from its users (eg venmo) is usually impossible. They won't cancel an account misusing my email so long as the transactions go through.

ucha• 4 years ago

EDIT: thanks everyone for quickly correcting my mistake, I missed the part that explained that more forms of contactless payments would be accepted

I don't really understand why a merchant would use this feature.

If you already use a PoS, why would you replace it with another one that only supports customers who own an Apple device?

If you accepted only cash, maybe it's a small improvement because you can use your existing iPhone if you had one to accept cashless payments from Apple customers...

Does Tap to Pay only make sense in the second case or am I missing something?

lxgr7• 4 years ago

why would you replace it with another one that only supports customers who own an Apple device?

It's not only Apple Pay:

US merchants will be able to accept Apple Pay _and other contactless payments_

darrenf• 4 years ago

If you already use a PoS, why would you replace it with another one that only supports customers who own an Apple device?

What makes you think it only supports payment from Apple devices? The press release is pretty clear:

At checkout, the merchant will simply prompt the customer to hold their iPhone or Apple Watch to pay with Apple Pay, their contactless credit or debit card, or other digital wallet near the merchant’s iPhone

microtonal• 4 years ago

If you already use a PoS, why would you replace it with another one that only supports customers who own an Apple device?

Did you read the article?

This will accept contactless cards, Google Pay, etc. as well.

riskable• 4 years ago

Sure would be nice if Apple and Google got together to accept each other's systems. Or even better: If there was a standard that let any device send money with any other device (using compatible hardware).

Imagine if there was a regulation that required interoperability. Or if the banks were forced to allow (authenticated) payments between systems without transaction fees.

We're 20 years overdue for this.

TAKEMYMONEY2• 4 years ago

Some kind of permissionless transactions on a decentralized ledger? I don't think the technology exists.

mackmgg• 4 years ago

There are lots of small vendors (especially at farmers markets) still using the swipe only Square reader. This will presumably allow them to start accepting contactless as well. The main advantage of this is most banks put the liability from fraud on the business for swipe/manual entry transactions, but not for EMV (chip/tap) transactions.

kyawzazaw3• 4 years ago

What do you think of this?

https://usa.visa.com/about-visa/newsroom/press-releases.rele...

Note: I worked on this

gigatexal• 4 years ago

So ... Square/Block is not dead?

aquark2• 4 years ago

Question for anyone in the know at Stripe ... does this make a iPhone work like the existing BBPOS WisePOS terminals and able to interact with a web app _without_ any code running on the phone itself (other than Stripe's)

Or is it more akin to the BBPOS Chipper readers and still needs a custom mobile app to interact with?

ie: can a platform built on Stripe use this for their customers without needing to supply a mobile app?

edwinwee2• 4 years ago

It's designed to work through a mobile app via the iOS SDK: https://stripe.com/docs/terminal/payments/setup-sdk?terminal....

aquark2• 4 years ago

Thanks -- appreciate the reply.

As a future product option I'd love to be able to treat these as standalone terminals, so we can offer a web based POS app (running on a different device) and the phone as a payment terminal without having to deploy our own mobile app.

motohagiography• 4 years ago

Correct me if I'm way off, but when Apple launched it, iPhones had a separate secure element with applets that use keys stored in slots, very similar to chip/pin cards. The protocols for payments (EMV standards) all used symmetric keys, and so any issuer who wants to be a part of Apple Pay needs Apple to get a key into their SE.

It's possible to do this through a process called "personalization," where in general, a secure element has "initialization" keys that are installed at manufacture, but then the keys get updated (personalized) once the user gets it.

I'd speculate that Stripe could get integrated using a personalization protocol, with new keys over the existing protocols, and not require its own intitialization keys in the SE. A further speculation would be that Apple's pay partnership with GS may have facilitated a different protocol that uses more manageable asymmetric keys for doing reconciliations, and all the complexity is in integrating with generic payment terminals, whereas for anything that doesn't depend on that, you can use more sensible protocols that aren't freighted with backward compatability to chip/pin cards.

Square would probably be the easier integration, but Stripe may have some secret sauce for this. Anyway, wildly speculative, and would be interested what's way off in that.

frb2• 4 years ago

Apple will work closely with leading payment platforms and app developers across the payments and commerce industry to offer Tap to Pay on iPhone to millions of merchants in the US.

Is it just me feeling that Apple is again playing gatekeeper to iPhone APIs and hindering true competition by "working with leading platforms" aka. the big players, like Stripe or PayPal, essentially leaving startups and smaller players disadvantaged.

Why not just finally open the NFC API?

dagmx2• 4 years ago

They do that when they're concerned about bad actors or want to prove out the API first with a controlled set of people who are willing to experience breakage

frb2• 4 years ago

Isn't that what the AppStore review process is for?

Or why not provide an extra approval process for the NFC API?

On the other hand they were not so concerned with bad actors when releasing AirTags.

Feels more that it's about control than safety and like that kind of decision that got them into all the antitrust probes in the first place.

fomine3• 4 years ago

NFC API itself don't enable user to steal from contactless credit card. See Android.

alwillis12• 4 years ago

They do that when they're concerned about bad actors or want to prove out the API first with a controlled set of people who are willing to experience breakage

Not only must you be reviewed by the App Store, but your app will require security entitlements to act as a payment processor. And you'll have to be a registered Apple developer in good standing.

If a malicious actor went through all this trouble to grab some transactions, they'd be shutdown within hours of the scam and Apple would refund the money.

Also, who's going to trust or want to use "Bob's rando payment processor"? No merchant is going to do that.

gernb• 4 years ago

When do they announce they want 30% of all payments made with this system?

mensetmanusman• 4 years ago

Add society goes cashless we need to support infrastructure that doesn’t leave the poor behind.

exikyut9• 4 years ago

What I wish could happen but probably never will: that this takes off sufficiently much that it's commercially viable for Apple to spinoff a personal payments business that lets me yeet small amounts of money directly out of people's bank cards for personal payments. Perhaps with an eg $50-100 limit or so.

PayPal allows free C2C transactions that are much higher in any case.

throwaway22032• 4 years ago

Hacker News is such a bizarre place.

On the one hand, we have threads about how browsers are fingerprintable and some app is using telemetry and endless discussions on theoretical zero-knowledge protocols and the importance of cryptography and Snowden saying this and that that get voted up to the top.

On the other hand, something like this comes up which is basically another step along the "no-one accepts cash" funnel and so now everything you ever buy with metadata is part of the borg. Like, you've literally deliberately introduced an MiTM.

I don't get this blind spot. Paying with cash is literally the easiest thing I do to reduce my data trail.

lkschubert8• 4 years ago

The obvious answer is that the responders are two distinct subsets of hn users.

izzydata• 4 years ago

I don't think it is a reflection of peoples opinions on things. If it is tech news then someone will post it.

Blindnoplan• 4 years ago

Most people dont care enough, even on here I would assume, to be bothered by their data being out there and honestly same for me. Cash is annoying to handle a lot less sanitary than just holding your phone next to the merchants.

runeks2• 4 years ago

It's almost as if the people who upvote stuff differ in opinion on what is valuable and/or interesting

dharmab2• 4 years ago

It's as if there are many different people who use the internet.

I personally like using a credit card because it creates a data trail I can use to review my spending and budgets.

jdgoesmarching• 4 years ago

I must have missed when we all voted on only using cash. It’s like security bro veganism.

websap3• 4 years ago

Carrying cash comes with inherent risks.

Hakashiro• 4 years ago

And Apple Pay is much harder to trace (except for Apple and your bank I guess?) than just using a plastic static card.

I can't count the amount of times I've lost or been robbed physical bills. Never once have money siphoned out of my online bank. I don't use cash anymore, I'm all digital, and still use a VPN to watch porn.

Turns out different people have different threat models. My threat model includes my neighbour, my ISP (to a certain extent), my employer (again, to a certain extent), private companies like Google or Facebook, burglars, thieves, and scammers.

It doesn't include the NSA, the government, the NSO group, banks, or North Korean government-sponsored hackers. If you think you can defend yourself against the NSA, lol. Good luck.

TameAntelope• 4 years ago

I don't want to reduce my data trail, as I don't believe there are meaningful risks associated with creating one.

AlexanderTheGr8• 4 years ago

How long before some stores don't accept cash? How long before banks do a background check (taking weeks) before giving you cash?

wmeredith• 4 years ago

How long before some stores don't accept cash?

This already happens. My closest NFL and MLB stadiums do not accept cash for anything inside the park.

djhn• 4 years ago

Already happens. My local bike shop stopped accepting cash.

dharmab2• 4 years ago

Cashless businesses were appearing in NYC pre-pandemic until the city passed a law against them to preserve access for unbanked consumers. This law was criticized as it greatly increased the cost of starting a small business. Then the pandemic happened and cash usage declined further.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/23/nyregion/nyc-cashless-ban... - Note the date

pomian• 4 years ago

Most Airlines quit accepting cash for on board purchases. "For our convenience"

user3939382• 4 years ago

There's apparently a lack of consensus which isn't surprising since I'm conflicted personally by these issues all the time: the tech itself is really cool, the practical effects and side effects often are not.

wyager• 4 years ago

Payment digitization is inevitable. The benefits outweighs the costs for 95% of people. The realistic options are payment through dystopian surveillance apparatus payment processors, or payment through bitcoin lightning (or similar).

ska4• 4 years ago

It's hard to imagine a plausible path to payment digitization without states asserting a) currency controls and b) some degree of visibility on transactions. I think on the latter they'll take a "well if anyone can see it, we should be able to " and "KYC is needed" etc. stance. The only way to avoid anyone seeing it will defeat (a) an not be acceptable to them. This would relegate to same status as any other black market, with better/broader tech.

MikeKusold• 4 years ago

Paying with your phone is actually more secure than the old mag-swipe method. Your phone will tokenize your credit card information, which makes it significantly harder to track credit card usage across various merchants.

Of course it isn't as private as cash, but it is a step forward from mag-swipe.

Square has a good explainer if you want to read more: https://squareup.com/us/en/townsquare/what-does-tokenization...

stavros2• 4 years ago

Harder for whom? The attack vector here isn't "hackers compromised everyone and can correlate your data", it's "Visa knows everything about you".

I agree with the GP, this is a huge privacy blind spot.

praseodym• 4 years ago

Apple Pay only tokenizes card information once when the card is added to the Apple Wallet on a device, not for every transaction. This means that usage for an on-device tokenized card can still be tracked until the card is removed and re-added.

dathinab4• 4 years ago

secure than the old mag-swipe

Though at least in the EU the mag-swipe method was phased out and replaced with a chip based method years ago. (A chip with secure module, requiring PIN if you pay for more then a small amount, or otherwise unusual.)

And as far as I know that method is still more secure then Apple pay and similar.

mritzmann• 4 years ago

I love the fact that both are represented on HN and yet there is - in most cases - a great disscussion culture.

ska4• 4 years ago

Paying with cash is literally the easiest thing I do to reduce my data trail.

Sure, if you prioritize anonymity in your transactions over convenience cash is much better.

OTOH, contactless pay with your phone is so much better than handing your card to a random server to make an imprint or whatever - and more secure/privacy maintaining than using the card itself if done right.

It's not a binary decision.

mcbutterbunz• 4 years ago

The truly bizarre/interesting part of all of this is how we assume users of a website to be of the same opinion on most topics.

dang• 4 years ago

Most of these paradoxes come from treating the community as if it were a person, which it isn't. It's a statistical cloud of millions of people (and hundreds of thousands of commenters) with a complete spectrum of views. People can contradict themselves, but a statistical cloud can't.

websap3• 4 years ago

Did they just completely destroy Square's POS device business?

joshstrange6• 4 years ago

No support for Swipe or Dip but this is pretty awesome. I still need swipe/dip so I'm stuck with my BTLE device for that stuff but this is pretty awesome for contactless.

websap3• 4 years ago

Yeah, but this seems like a pretty e2e solution to me now. Most people get an iPhone before their first credit card. They can not get an Apple Card directly on their iPhone with a few touches that instantly gets added to their wallet (the physical card takes days to ship), the card in the iPhone Wallet can now directly be used.

0xy• 4 years ago

This is a clear shot across the bow of Dorsey's empire. Given Square's huge portion of their revenue coming from readers, things have to be looking bleak over there.

Square is down 61% since October.

NovemberWhiskey2• 4 years ago

I think until this goes out of the "NFC only" card capture space there's going to be room to compete. I don't think you can realistically run a point-of-scale business that doesn't allow mag stripe / chip payment yet. Maybe I'm wrong though.

jon889• 4 years ago

Weird that this is US first when in the UK it’s extremely rare not to be able to use contactless. (I only say UK as I live there, but definitely there are other countries that are heavily focused on contactless)

curiousllama• 4 years ago

Square stock lives and dies with bitcoin - wouldn't use the stock as an indicator of this

edwinwee2• 4 years ago

(I work at Stripe.) Square and Stripe Terminal are designed for pretty different use-cases:

Square is an instant POS that small business owners can use to accept payments for their shops.

Stripe Terminal allows platforms and tech-forward companies to integrate with the Stripe API—to deploy and customize in-person payments for bespoke checkout flows (think Shopify, Lightspeed, or HouseCall Pro).

adventured4• 4 years ago

A lot of bubbly tech stocks are down massively, it's not particular to Square. The bubble popped.

Teladoc is down 77%

Fastly is down 77%

Pinterest is down 71%

DraftKings is down 70%

Zoom is down 69%

Palantir is down 66%

DocuSign is down 62%

DoorDash is down 61%

Twilio is down 57%

Twitter is down 55%

Roblox is down 55%

Etsy is down 54%

DigitalOcean is down 53%

Shopify is down 50%

Cloudflare is down 50%

Unity is down 49%

Netflix is down 42%

CrowdStrike is down 39%

Okta is down 36%

Atlassian is down 35%

Salesforce is down 31%

And so on. The air also continues to leak out of the meme garbage stocks.

mstipetic• 4 years ago

Wow this is actually true. I have no idea how I'm only realizing this now

joshstrange6• 4 years ago

This is really freaking cool and a long time coming. It's sad that iPads are left out since those are the primary POS device that stores use (off the shelf device at least) but I look forward to testing this out when they release it. I need to support swipe/dip so I'll have to stick with my BTLE device for that but this would be cool addition to have contactless-only checkout stations manned by people with iPhones.

aplummer• 4 years ago

As an aside, if anyone knows why Australia has 100% contactless payment penetration I’d be interested to know

LeicaLatte• 4 years ago

Very cool! Looking forward to POS demos at the March event.

tsycho• 4 years ago

So is this iPhone to iPhone only, or can the customer use any NFC enabled credit card directly, or (shudder) their Android phone?

BenjiWiebe3• 4 years ago

Yep, Android and tap-to-pay cards will work too.

prepend• 4 years ago

This will be nice.

A few months ago a street vendor was selling a book he had written. He seemed like a nice guy and I wanted to support his initiative. The book was only $10.

He didn’t take cash, nor Venmo, nor PayPal. He took cash app, Apple Pay and a bunch of other things I had never heard of. I don’t use cash app and wouldn’t sign up just for him.

We tried to use Apple Pay but couldn’t figure out how to add his contact info and send money. I’m sure we could have eventually figured it out, but we gave up. He also had an android phone with some apps there but couldn’t work with my iPhone.

This sounds like it would have been really useful. I’ll settle with “just give $10 to this person who has an iPhone, I don’t care about anything else” as a step closer to “just give $10 to this person who has anything”

Pxtl3• 4 years ago

Tangentially related, I'm still surprised how few low-end Android phones have NFC. Like, the Moto G line is everywhere and they still don't have that?

eole666• 4 years ago

Outside of USA, where most people don't have an iPhone, I don't really see the point.. It would be more usefull with ipads or any less personal device : If the shop's owner haves an iPhone accepting paiement but it's an employee doing the paiements, the shop opwner has to give his personal phone to the employee to accept paiement ? Or he needs to buy an other iPhone with no personal data and accepting paiement (is it even possible ? ) to give the employee ? .. and now it's already more expensive than a simple contactless paiement machine.

noneeeed• 4 years ago

Lots of people other than shops take money. There are lots of one-man businesses or tradespeople who take credit card through services like SumUp which require a seperate device paired to their phone. For people like that this will be very useful.

Both my plumber and the guy who fixed our washing machine used SumUp, as did most of the market-stall holders at the Christmas market this year. All of them were using the phone-linked version (rather than the one with its own SIM).

Sure, it's not right for everyone, but it will be perfect for a lot of people.

clintonb• 4 years ago

Later this year, US merchants will be able to accept Apple Pay and other contactless payments simply by using iPhone and a partner-enabled iOS app

The target user is a US-based merchant. Most likely, it's a small business, perhaps a sole proprietorship, that uses a small Square reader today. This gives that business one more way to accept payments, but without the extra hardware.

A business with multiple employees/points of sale has alternatives. This is probably not the solution for them.

uptownfunk• 4 years ago

My local bakery doesn't even accept cash anymore. Probably a lot of places. I was explaining to my 3 year old that "a long time ago people used to pay with these green pieces of paper called money, now we use this thing called Apple Pay on our phones"

brtknr• 4 years ago

Contactless but you have to tap and most will make slight contact :) exciting nevertheless!

sydthrowaway• 4 years ago

How does Square feel about this?

YoungWeb• 4 years ago

Contactless payments are great but there are many intermediaries in 1 simple purchase in the current payment processing system. I would like to see digital payments evolve into true p2p transactions. Let me pass you my bits. I don't want to pass them to bob, jessica, then larry and then have larry pass you the bits.

matthewaveryusa• 4 years ago

Does anyone have a doc with the specifics of how tap-to-pay works? Specifically, what happens when mulitple individuals are in proximity? I imagine there's a payment request broadcast followed by a payment allow response, followed by the broadcaster sending a subsequent request message to a selected payment response? I'm curious about the specifics and what kind of clever things the protocol has to maximize security and minimize DoS, and what kind of information is transmitted on each leg of the protocol

0xTJ• 4 years ago

This title is awful, there's really no way for me to read it as accepting payment, instead of the ubiquitous paying that way.

billylo• 4 years ago

I hope this would mean CoreNFC will no longer block payment application id tags.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/corenfc

steadyready4• 4 years ago

Man, I swear sometimes I feel like I’m on a forum full of wanted criminals, state actors, and/or felons.

I’m not saying I’m against privacy. I am all for not being tracked, but we are approaching absurdity.

I really want to see all of you who praise “privacy” go fully offline and use only cash. No cards. No bank account. Nothing. Salary? Cash, because earnings could also be sold and used for advertising. Groceries? Cash. Gas? Cash. No checks also, as they can be tracked /s Also, while we are at it, no Android, no iOS, no Windows or Macs. Only Linux, because we can’t trust UE vendors.

Really, maybe we should start spending our energy in convincing legislators that PII should not be sold along with transaction data/histories. Matter a fact, let’s rally for universal privacy laws. How about that?

Let’s not go 50 back in evolution just because “visa bad”. I’m happy not to lose cash or reach for my wallet anymore.

glial• 4 years ago

Agreed. I'm all for privacy too. But trying to solve social problems with technical solutions seems optimistic at best. Even if everyone on this website uses cash only, the issue of data privacy still exists for the other 99.999% of society - and we should try to solve it for them too.

Santosh83• 4 years ago

Cash decentralises power to the extent possible. E-currency centralises it to an absurd degree. That's the point. The slope of convenience though is gradual and slippery indeed. Institutions we've had for centuries crumbling in a matter of decades is a matter of concern. They worked more or less. There is no guarantee what is replacing them will work but we seem to have blind faith they will, since we're throwing the baby & the bathwater very gleefully out the window.

steadyready4• 4 years ago

I never said “remove cash”. It should continue to exist nevertheless, because it’s a level of system redundancy and backup. I just said that I shouldn’t have to sacrifice quality of life improvements and STILL have my PII data sold from other channels.

dheera• 4 years ago

Convenience and privacy are NOT mutually exclusive, the details are in the implementation.

steadyready4• 4 years ago

Not 100%, but we can outlaw PII selling, and therefor everybody wins. I get “peace of mind” knowing IKEA doesn’t get targeted information, and IKEA still gets some level of anonymous demographic data from advertisers.

throwaway44432• 4 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30260987

tinus_hn2• 4 years ago

How do you go from ‘Apple is offering a new payment method’ to a rant about how you don’t care about privacy?

Why would people have to choose between using only cash and sharing their data with everyone? The normal thing to do is limit who can access the data as much as possible. And if people don’t do that, why would legislators care?

steadyready4• 4 years ago

"How do you go from ‘Apple is offering a new payment method’ to a rant about how you don’t care about privacy?"

Because some other people started ranting about cashless payments, payment processors and their privacy.

"Why would people have to choose between using only cash and sharing their data with everyone?"

Because that's how other people put it. I was just raising the point that we shouldn't have to give up QoL improvements, instead push for more privacy-focused laws, like limiting PII-data being sold along with transaction histories.

diebeforei4852• 4 years ago

Great, now I need an RFID-blocking wallet because any yeehaw can place their iPhone to my pocket to charge my credit card.

lxgr7• 4 years ago

That's been possible ever since mobile POS services have started supporting contactless payments, without any catastrophic fallout.

diebeforei4852• 4 years ago

It's obviously different when everyone already has an iPhone. Most crime is opportunistic.

npollock• 4 years ago

"use their iPhone to seamlessly and securely accept Apple Pay, contactless credit and debit cards, and other digital wallets through a simple tap"

other digital wallets = crypto?

hrdwdmrbl• 4 years ago

Yes, could I accept DAI? Use State Channels?

lxgr7• 4 years ago

Google Pay, Samsung Pay etc.

alwillis12• 4 years ago

other digital wallets = crypto?

Yes! WWDC should be pretty interesting this year: https://9to5mac.com/2021/12/28/comment-tim-cook-said-apple-i...

babyshake• 4 years ago

This seems to not be an open API but instead only available to a whitelisted group of partners. Is this correct? Is it reasonable to expect this to have open availability by later this year?

manzu• 4 years ago

Why is this US only?

holoduke• 4 years ago

How secure is this? For example in the Netherlands creditcards are showing a secret number on the backside of the card. Let's say the app on the phone is altered and making pictures of the card once it swiped over. The phone can then collect all information to make a purchase. I would not trust somebodies phone to swipe my card over.

pliuchkin• 4 years ago

That's a good question, the first thing that came to my mind was someone cloning cards.

dustinmoris• 4 years ago

Oh no, now Epic will get upset because they won't be able to plug in an external USB 2.0 CC reader into an iPhone.

dnbdave• 4 years ago

How long until I can mug people via NFC and without the pesky mandatory minimums that come with weapons charges? Soon?

syspec2• 4 years ago

You can do that today, https://squareup.com/us/en/point-of-sale/restaurants

morpheuskafka• 4 years ago

So between this and the free Square magstripe reader for Lighting port, you've got everything covered.

The only issue would be liability shift for a card that has EMV but doesn't have contactless and thus has to be processed as magstripe, but those cards are getting rarer as most issuers are replacing with NFC-enabled ones.

aetherspawn2• 4 years ago

This is such a big deal because for small merchants, these terminals are generally really expensive and take high cuts.

Now small cafes, tradies, etc getting on their feet can use the hardware they already have to start processing straight away.

barkerja• 4 years ago

Does the use of a terminal tack on more fees in addition to the fees the processor already takes?

aetherspawn2• 4 years ago

In a lot of cases the processor is not the bank (SmartPay, Square, etc), so usually, yes, they'll want a cut. And then you'll also get charged for the paper rolls (for receipts), and renting of the EFTPOS equipment if you rent it.

I ripped this off some marketing material that I found for a popular EFTPOS terminal in Australia:

A merchant service fee is a fee you pay to your EFTPOS provider to process your transaction payments. This fee is calculated as a percentage (or fixed fee) of every transaction where a customer swipes, inserts, or taps their card at your terminal.

For every transaction, your bank pays fees which include: a fee to the issuing bank (e.g. the bank that issued the card), the scheme fee (e.g. Visa, Mastercard, EFTPOS), and the switch fee (who processes the transaction).

tannhaeuser• 4 years ago

I think governments should wake up to defend monetary sovereignty/independence before it's too late, like with the web/the ad market.

IvanK_net• 4 years ago

I wish people were more aware of fees. You pay around 1% of the amount as a fee. Without these fees, everytihng could be 1% cheaper. Imagine every person in the world making 1% more overnight. 1% of your money is a lot.

That is why you will never be able to give money to a friend this way. You give $100, but they receive $99. They give it back after a week, and you receive $98.

stepanhruda• 4 years ago

Not that easy, most people get more than 1% back on their cards. It’s a reallocation mechanism where poor people who can’t pay their credit card bills end up sponsoring everyone else

bouzouk• 4 years ago

On Android, this has been a project in Europe for a few years, called SoftPOS, that should be coming live in coming weeks/month (ie. be able to acquire a contactless card payment using only your phone- no other hardware).

Apple declined to be part of it and thus it was expected that they release there own version soon.

jonobird1• 4 years ago

It'll be interesting to see how Square reacts to this, and how much traction and market share this builds over the next 12 months, if any.

mariojv3• 4 years ago

Would I be able to use this to process payments at a garage sale without going through a bunch of hoops? That would be great.

I know you could theoretically use Zelle/Paypal/Venmo, but it seems much easier to just be able to accept a card payment. Plus, I wouldn't have to give strangers my email, phone number, or username, which would be needed for those payment methods.

est• 4 years ago

This will be a huge hit in China if works out. With UnionPay merchants can receive money directly into their deposit cards, hopefully without fees. It will eat Alibaba and Tencent's lunch.

jaimex2• 4 years ago

It's a trap!

thasaleni2• 4 years ago

this is dope, and also something I have been working on on android (yes I am gonna be that guy, Android has supported this for a long time)... it's great for informal merchants, and maybe waiters that run around a bar collecting bills from customers... but actual POS devices aren't going anywhere, there is always gonna be a need for them, this function has been there and even has a name (softPos) many companies can give you this functionality TODAY on your android phone, so yes apple devices can now participate but it won't shake the market as everyone thinks.

breakpointalpha• 4 years ago

Fun fact, I was out late last night at a local upscale gas station. Think clean, well lit, and modern touchscreen sandwich ordering. NOT a dirty, broken down place. You'd expect the tech to work flawlessly in a place like this.

I was second in line behind a younger guy who asked to use his iPhone tap to pay, the clerk shrugged and pointed to the card scanner. Guy taps his phone and the scanner bricks, hard. The young man was somewhat embarrassed for holding up the line and sheepishly dug some old school greenbacks out of his pockets to pay before slinking out the door.

The clerk confusedly tried without luck to recover the register, before giving up and asking me and the other 6 people in line to move to another register. I had a little mini panic because all I had was a card, no cash, and about $20 worth of snacks. What do we do when electronics fail?

rswail4• 4 years ago

The way google/apple/samsung pay work is that there is a secure element that is running its own OS that contains applications. For contactless payment (the consumer side), there are apps that implement the EMV NFC standards and also interface with the tokenization services that are run by the card issuers.

In this case, it's a different sort of application that provides the merchant side of the EMV transaction, provisioned as part of the PCI SPoC standard (https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/assessors_and_solutions...).

SPoC relaxes some of the physical security requirements while enhancing online monitoring (of the application and security of keys etc) and approval of an end-to-end implementation.

So the SPoC standard will allow merchant side payment processing without needing specific PA-DSS compliant readers etc, because the end-to-end between the secure PIN reader (SCR-P standard) and the SPoC monitoring replaces that.

Apple unveils contactless payments via Tap to Pay on iPhone

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