"Its payments are also routed from the retailer to the ACH system instead of the credit card system, which saves retailers from having to pay interchange fees (typically around 2% of the transaction amount)"
If I only have my phone which I have android pay on and I need to get something from a drug store, I would go to CVS but they don't accept NFC. So I will have to go to Walgreen's instead which is usually near a CVS. So I don't get why they don't offer NFC, because keeping 98% of the transaction amount is better than 0.
What matters to a retailer isn't the revenue, it's the difference between costs and revenue.
In the real world, its about profits, not volume.
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the reviews have never used the actual app, but have instead downloaded it and rated it one star in response to stories like this: https://daringfireball.net/2014/10/nfc_apple_pay
I was in line at 7-11 at my university, where an girl was trying to use the currentc app. She was 2 people ahead of me, when I went up to pay she was still trying to pay with the app. At first her screen was to dim, and the scanner would not read the QR code. Eventually she was able to pay, but I was already long gone by that time. If you look on the google play store it has a rating of 1.1 starts.
This is straight from its website,"Merchant Customer Exchange is the only merchant-owned mobile commerce network built to streamline the customer shopping experience across all major retail verticals."
With an app that rates 1.1 stars and no improvement, I don't think it cares about the shopping experience, and people will see this eventually.