What frustrates me is the way everyone talks about Apple Pay as if it's the standard in mobile payments. Everyone calls contactless payments Apple Pay, which is technology other countries have had for many years built into the cards themselves via an NFC chip. Visa calls it PayWave(TM), because you just wave your credit card over the terminal to pay. I have been taking advantage of the benefits of contactless pay since 2011 with PayWave. Phones later came out with NFC support and now we can emulate this "contactless" signal with the phone's NFC chip rather than those in credit cards. Other than the added security of making up a new card number for your particular credit card when you add it to your digital wallet (read: Google Pay or Apple Pay or Samsung Pay, etc.), and separate accounting, there's no difference from contactless payments that have been around for OVER a decade now.
We talk about Apple Pay as if that's the standard. We talk about Apple Pay as if it's what allows you to pay with your watch. It's not. Contactless payments are. You can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contactless_payment. The intro paragraph:
> Contactless payment systems are credit cards and debit cards, key fobs, smart cards, or other devices, including smartphones and other mobile devices, that use radio-frequency identification (RFID) or near field communication (NFC, e.g. Samsung Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Fitbit Pay, or any bank mobile application that supports contactless) for making secure payments.
So as you can see, Google Pay is practically identical to Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, etc. and neither of them are the standard. NFC payments are. And they don't have to be in an Apple device.
Sometime around 2014-15 when Ventra was rolling out in Chicago, I was intrigued by the "contactless" thing it was advertising. Some copy on Citi's website indicated there might be a contactless version of my card. Customer service had no idea what I was talking about. After a while on hold, I learned that there had been a contactless version, but it was retracted.
In the US market, Apple Pay came on the scene way bigger and way earlier than anything else. The traditional issuers weren't interested. So of course Apple gets the credit: it was the one to actually field the technology.
Samsung Pay is different. It works with swipe terminals too, by generating a magnetic field that imitates a magstripe card. A few years ago this was a big deal: NFC acceptance was pretty much only at hipster coffee shops and food trucks with Square readers, where the clientele all had iPhones anyway. Not so much now that most terminals upgraded to comply with the EMV mandate also have NFC.
Google Pay (then Google wallet) came out in 2011, 3 years before Apple pay and 4 years before Samsung Pay. So no, Apple was not the one to field the technology.
Yeah, but it was another case of Apple doing it better then anyone. I was an Android user from probably 2009 until 2016 and used Google Wallet as much as I could. In fact, I think I still have my Google Wallet card [1] in a drawer at home. The simple fact was Google Wallet's NFC payments were neat when they worked, but the support was terrible. I am not sure if it's because the US was so behind when it came to credit card terminal technology at the time, but the support incredibly lacking.
It's like how people say Microsoft had resolution independence before Apple. It's true... if you don't care that it was shit. This is HackerNews though, the spiritual successor to "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
Like way behind. I remember visiting from Canada and being surprised when cashiers had no idea what chip and pin was. We had chip and pin in Canada for years already, but the US was still relying on signatures.
One of Apple's core strength is in marketing. I heard some folks refer to an Android phone as an iPhone. When I pointed out that it was in fact an Android (LG), they didn't knew what Android was. For them, the category of devices that we call "smartphones", are named iPhones.
My understanding is Google Pay, Samsung Pay, etc allow Google and friends to track your CC purchases because of the way it's designed, where Apple Pay is designed in such a way that Apple can not tell who you are spending your money with.
source: "Apple doesn't retain any transaction information that can be tied back to you—your transactions stay between you, the merchant or developer, and your bank or card issuer."[0]
Note how that statement is worded. "Apple doesn't retain" means they very well have access to the transaction info, they're just not storing it. I wouldn't call that designed in such a way that they can't read your transactions. It's more of a promise, similar to how google analytics promises to remove the last octet from IPs if you enable a flag.
It's worth noting that the merchant, bank, and credit card issuer can and do regularly sell that information off in de-identified form. Card networks especially like monetizing the data since it's very powerful.
I can't find the page describing the program on Visa's website, but their privacy opt-out describes it pretty well [1].
Yes but they'd do it every time you use your card anyways. So back to cash only? In the US you're screwed without using credit cards and in Europe I would not want to go back out of convenience.
Carrying 800 grams of coins around me all the time sucks.
You are thinking Apple Card, the Apple credit card, which is different from Apple Pay, the payment platform. That said, I don't disagree that GS almost certainly collects every bit of data they can.
I assume that's handled by the merchant directly to VISA/MC/etc, not by Apple. I've certainly never had to re-auth my apple pay to the payment terminal for a refund.
We talk about Apple Pay as if that's the standard. We talk about Apple Pay as if it's what allows you to pay with your watch. It's not. Contactless payments are. You can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contactless_payment. The intro paragraph:
> Contactless payment systems are credit cards and debit cards, key fobs, smart cards, or other devices, including smartphones and other mobile devices, that use radio-frequency identification (RFID) or near field communication (NFC, e.g. Samsung Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Fitbit Pay, or any bank mobile application that supports contactless) for making secure payments.
So as you can see, Google Pay is practically identical to Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, etc. and neither of them are the standard. NFC payments are. And they don't have to be in an Apple device.