Japan forces Apple and Google to open their mobile platforms • The Register

sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al to Technology@beehaw.org – 241 points –
Japan forces Apple and Google to open their mobile platforms
theregister.com
67

You are viewing a single comment

Until earlier this year, I could make NFC payments with the app of my credit card company. AFAIK contactless payments on Android were never locked to Google Pay/Wallet. But I have no idea why there's no competition in this space. I'd expect e.g. PayPal to have something, but if they do I never heard of it - and I did look once, briefly.

Because to implement this you need to negotiate with individual credit card issuers. Basically how this works is that your phone is being issued a virtual card with the keys locked inside the phone's HSM. Then it can be used to make NFC payments just like any physical card. So you need 1. contracts with many card providers, 2. card issuance processes with these providers 3. huge amounts of compliance bureaucracy. At the end of the day it isn't really worth it unless you are a huge company and expect to have tons of users or see it as an essential feature of your phone OS.

You mean the thing any credit card issuer does anyway?

Most credit card issuers don't issue credit cards to random apps by solo developers.

It seems many banks/providers used to had this functionality and just stopped maintaining in favor of Google/Apple Pay.

Hopefully they decide to do it again.

Why would they do that when Google and Apple already do all the work for them?