Honestly, I think it was Apple refusing to fully support NFC until 2016 that prevented the market from jumping on contactless payments, at least in the US. They were holding something like a third of the market back from doing it which really made selling adoption to merchants difficult.

Contactless bank cards were widespread in the UK before Apple or Google had their own payment systems. I think the "real story", as it were, is that the banking industry held contactless payments way more than Apple ever did.

This is not true!

Sorry for the passion but i was involved in the mobile payment scene at the time. It was not the banks halting the development of mobile payment. It was: 1- Apple 2- MNOs (Mobile Network Operators) 3- Samsung

Apple closed off the iphone NFC api which dried up VC funding in the mobile payment scene. This is one of the reason we have QR Codes everywhere today, and not NFC tags.

To securely process mobile payment, you needed to have a secure enclave (SE) on the phone which would keep encryption keys safely. At the time, the MNOs wanted that secure enclave to be the SIM card, so they could control that space. Google retaliated by cutting some circuitry between the SIM Card and the phone: the SWI lines. Banks were charging north of a million $ to embed applications in the SIM Cards, and were charging you the same for any update. Apple at the time started charging 4 million $ as a deposit to acquire a special nfc permission (walmart and starbucks had one) to emulate a credit card.

Samsung was the worst. They were already embedding a Secure element in their phones without giving access to it. They started 2 or 3 years ago giving access to 3rd partys.

>Apple closed off the iphone NFC api which dried up VC funding in the mobile payment scene. This is one of the reason we have QR Codes everywhere today, and not NFC tags.

Yep, this was my experience as well, working in the NFC space at the time. Apple also basically forced the whole IoT space to start focusing on QR codes instead of NFC tags, because they were lagging technologically with the iPhone.

You're replying to someone talking about contactless card payments, and you're talking about mobile payments. They are not the same thing.

Contactless card payments and mobile payments are the same under the hood. It's just ISO 14443 at the end of the day. Mobile payments are just Host-Card Emulation (HCE).

Some links: - https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/connectivity/nfc/... - https://xamoom.com/new-nfc-capabilities-for-all-iphones/

GP originally replied to my comment about contactless payments, not cards. In the US their adoption was synonymous.

Right, and with the advent of NFC in phones, US consumers didn't need the banks' permission to pay contactlessly. Despite this, contactless payment adoption was still slow in the U.S. even though most phones had NFC, it wasn't critical mass until Apple finally decided to support NFC technology.

You do actually need the bank's permission to enroll a card for Apple/Android Pay, it is a feature they have to support.

It is today with different added features, but back in the 2010s you didn't need your bank to support it. You could do it with your VISA/Mastercard/AMEX credit or debit card.

In what country? I tried to add my cards to Google Pay the day it came out and some were allowed and others weren't.

That's probably because Google Pay was second gen w/ additional features. Google Wallet accepted all my bank (credit union) debit and credit cards.

I would argue it was a myriad of factors. Here in NY the adoption of OMNY and the pandemic contributed far more than Apple rolling out Tap to pay. The biggest issue being merchants lacking having the motivation to move away from outdated readers.

There was an attempt to deploy contactless cards in the US in the mid 00's. I used mine once at a grocery store. Merchants rarely supported them so banks stopped issuing them.

This is correct. The other comment that I can't reply to is incorrect. Banks not supporting apple pay were a significant holdup to NFC payments in the US.

Apple never played a significant role in any project since their install base was just too small.

Apple is a company with a clear focus. They didn’t even support MMS in the first iPhone. Rightly so.

Given transaction volumes, I imagine Apple will make more money from Apple Pay than the App Store soon, even with an order of magnitude smaller rake.