In*Apple Pay, the first mobile payments solution that you’ll actually use*Owen Williams writes:
Android fans seem annoyed by the notion that Apple has NFC now, claiming that they’ve had it for years. The only difference is Android’s had it for years and still failed to get anywhere with it thanks to a mess of standards and lack of co-operative banks.
This gets to the nub of Apple’s long-term success. Android phone makers bolted NFC into their phones first then prayed banks, developers and others in the payment loop would take the hint. They didn’t. They were never going to. A chip is not enough.It took Apple more than two years patient work*behind the scenes to tie up loose ends. If that meant leaving payment technology out of the iPhone for two generations, then so be it. People often turn to cliches like ‘ecosystem’ when they want to describe Apple’s approach. That’s not a term I’d use. There’s more to getting these things right than signing agreements with other parties.
Most electronics companies boast obsessive attention to engineering, but Apple manages to take this mentality out into the wider world.
Filed under: Apple Tagged: iPhone, payments