Given the sorry technological state of mobile payments, such as their reliance on QR to authenticate, it’s more likely that quick adoption resulted from having no legacy POS solution and not superior innovation.

Unclear how QR has meaningfully less friction than NFC solutions.

QR is fast, reliable and incredibly cheap to implement. It scans at a distance, with no significant chance of unintended transactions or MITM attacks. If I'm a roadside snack vendor and want to accept mobile payments, I don't need to buy some sort of NFC widget, I just need to print out a QR code and stick it on my cart. I can send 100rmb to a friend in a couple of seconds, without worrying whether their phone is NFC-enabled.

QR payment exemplifies the sort of innovation that is powering China's growth and that American companies profoundly fail to understand. It isn't sexy, but it works well enough to become ubiquitous. America is just barely catching up with a two generation old payment technology (chip & pin), while China have leapfrogged them with a worse-is-better solution.

"with no significant chance of unintended transactions or MITM attacks"

I have worked with anti-fraud teams at Alibaba and other unnamed large Chinese firms. This is extremely far from the truth, and shoulder surfing QR scanning scams have been in the national news in China many times. NFC tags are cheap and already being proposed for scooters, etc.

QR proliferation is again enabled mostly by the fact that there is no incumbency advantage, not because they're better innovations. Even you admit they aren't, and you don't seem to fully understand how bad QR is as a payment media. Imagine Square's uptake in American SMBs and then mentally map that almost every Chinese retailer is or recently was an SMB. That's simply what's happening.

I don't harbor the notion that the US is particularly advanced, especially in standardized infrastructure, but pointing to QR as an example of Chinese innovation is not convincing.

I knew the man who was on the team that came with idea of using QR for payment. Their pretty much one and only point was to circumvent Apple's blockade of existing payment mechanisms.

And yes, Japanese mail order magazines came with idea of "offline Internet shopping" back in nineties, in era of flatbed scanners

I thank him for keeping me gainfully employed for many months.

you failed to understand because you didn't pay attention to the context

Would you please stop posting uncivil and/or unsubstantive comments to HN? You've done it quite a bit already, and we're trying for better than that here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Technology adoption is always easier when there aren't legacy systems.

Just see how long it's taking the US do adopt card chips & PINs while other countries that got their automated banking systems later are almost fully converted.

Mobile payments seem way easier to adopt in China and African countries because what existed before was so bad.

Payments are a cultural problem, not a technology problem. There is absolutely nothing technological that prevents more sophisticated payments systems from being rolled out in the US, except that people don't want to use them.

This is a poor example. You would have been better off going with high-speed rail, although even that is mostly a cultural problem - the cost is not in trains, but land displacement.

> And yet mobile payments are integrated into Chinese e-commerce with the frictionlessness that Apple Pay and the others can only dream of.

That’s not a technology problem, that’s a political problem.