I get why the banks are not happy, but I can tell them that I am not going to use Chase Wallet, Bank of America Wallet, Citi Wallet...just pay the fee and be thankful for the reduced payment friction, which they invariably make money from. PS: Nobody is going to use Paze (yet another half baked wallet), other than to collect the free $10 to sign up for it.
Somewhat related, even Walmart relented and now supports Apple Pay/Contactless. Every big merchant has now relented (Kroger, Home Depot, Walmart).
Another alternative (in the US, at least) is tapping a piece of plastic instead of your phone and not inviting any of the tech giants into your transactions at all. What an unforced error, to shovel more of your data at them needlessly.
> is tapping a piece of plastic instead of your phone and not inviting any of the tech giants into your transactions at all.
Apple doesn't see individual transactions when Apple Pay is used at retail stores' tap-to-pay terminals. The secret card payment token is sent from the phone to the credit-card's issuing bank and bypasses Apple servers. In this way, using Apple Pay is more secure and private than plastic cards because the real card number details remains hidden from the merchant.
The iPhone does contact Apple servers to add a new card to the digital wallet. Apple servers then contacts the issuing bank to get the secret token the bank generates and then puts it in the digital wallet. Conceivably, the "add a new card to digital wallet" could also have been done without Apple in the middle but it would require a much more convoluted, less secure, and more user-hostile workflow to do it. (e.g. the end user would have to know what bank endpoint to contact, manually enter the long and cryptic digits of the secret token, or maybe scan a QR code on a computer screen that's vulnerable to interception and phishing.)
Importantly, this provides a degree of protection from compromised PoS terminals. Ever since I switched to nearly exclusively using Apple Pay for physical shopping I’ve had no unauthorized charges, whereas back when I was still tapping, inserting, or swiping my card I’d need to call and get a card or two replaced almost every year.
This information comes from the card issuer directly, after the transaction has completed. It usually requires the mobile banking app to be installed.
The wallet app has a way to get the information, but it’s not from the tap itself. The tap interaction is not able to provide this information back to the phone (because the transaction auth happens long after the tap interaction completes).
Taps are designed to work with fully offline devices (which is why you can tap a plastic card, it is powered by the card terminal for the duration of the tap only, and requires no online interaction)
Man, its amazing how confident you are about this, considering I know individual people who independently work at Visa, Mastercard, AND Apple, who have worked on mobile payments who independently confirm that none of them know any personal info and that its all pass-through.
So, are you sure you know what you are talking about?
This kind of appeal to authority [believe me because I say so!] doesn't really add much information, does it?
The report, above, is that previous transactions are visible within Apple's payment app. Apple agrees[1]. I'm willing to accept that this observation is based on reality and that it is reported in good faith.
Meanwhile, the suggestion is that Apple has no knowledge of transaction history.
Is there a way in which these two seemingly-conflicting concepts can be constructively combined into an understandable whole?
This is baffling, there's all sorts of information on my phone that Apple has zero knowledge of, why would the transactions be different?
Do you think Apple has complete copies of everything? I don't understand where this supposed contradiction is supposed to exist, unless you think that Apple has complete knowledge of all phone contents, which would require complete ignorance of the entire platform.
Yeah. But this is the US. This is all we’ve got. Having the central bank do it would be communism, and that’s bad. I learned about it from Saturday morning cartoons.
Ironically it's the central bank (and associated regulations) that cause these intermediaries to exist to begin with.
A protocol to support decentralized payments is a hobby project for an individual. You give each institution an identifier (e.g. their domain name) and each institution gives each customer an account number. If you're account 123 at Chase then you sign in as #123@chase.com, tell Chase you want to send $5 to #456@bankofamerica.com, they send the money and Bank of America tells their customer they have a new deposit. If you want to collect money from someone, you tell your bank to send their bank a payment request and they can either approve it manually (e.g. so you can deliver the goods for a one-time purchase) or configure some rules for which accounts get approved automatically up to some threshold amount (e.g. for recurring payments). Also no reason for banks in different countries not to all support the same protocol.
That doesn't require a central bank or any third party payments intermediary. All it requires is for banks to know how to send money to other banks, which they obviously already do and the specific implementation of that isn't even relevant to the customer-facing payments protocol. So how does this not exist? It can't be that no one wants it, so it's got to be that someone (e.g. Visa/MasterCard) doesn't want it.
yea, feels like tech giants do not have access to this already? they know where you are and what you do every second of every day, keeping away from ( while they know I was a target ) what was the amount on my receipt is really giving it to them :)
Remember CurrenC? The thing a bunch of them tried to make that failed horribly during test with no consumers liking it? If I remember a description it involved using an app where you had to scan a QR code, and then the point of sale terminal had to scan a QR code on your phone or something like that.
It was all so hilariously badly designed compared to tap and pay.
This is the government's problem. I tend to be on the side of less government, but it is so obvious that payment facilitation should be a service provided by the government. The government is just allowing corporations to collect rents, because they are lazy and incompetent.
They’re more like taxes than rents. It’s a constant cost applied to all goods because of the ubiquity of use means we pay with or without playing the credit card/payments game.
It's not a government problem, it's a competition problem. Fundamentally 1-3% is actually a very competitive rate for organizing the easy transfer of money and handling fraud. Merchants would rather the cost be free, and banks may want a larger slice of the pie, but until someone comes up with a better way of paying money for both sides this is the best we have. If government got involved all that could happen is fees would increase and then we'd miss out on future efficiency improvements and savings.
I don't really care about any of Apple's business partners being upset about their business terms with Apple. Developers want a bigger cut, banks want a bigger cut, Foxconn wants a bigger cut.
My interests as an Apple user are aligned with Apple. But even if I wasn't an Apple user, market forces determine what the "fair" cut is for everyone.
Another argument for turning finance into a public utility. Instead we have different factions of rentier capital competing for who gets to parasitize us.
Probably, but there is an upper limit on what people will be able to tolerate, everyone is aware of it and capitalism is trying to make products that meet it.
So, it’s not unlimited cost here.
The fact right now is that handling cash is more expensive than handling card- even with the fees, which is why Sweden, Estonia etc; are essentially cash-free countries.
At some point the fee’s will make you break-even I guess?
Walmart only relented because they finally broke through the final missing link of the contactless issue. They got customers conned into giving their phone numbers at checkout, just like it's the grocery store.
Cards get linked to accounts automatically behind the scenes based on first6/last4 card number tracking, then everyone else self-selects to punch their phone number on the screen.
Same reason Walmart Radio is such gruesome auditory cancer, it's part of the data collection and advertising vehicle.
That could be part of the reason, but also I think insisting on chip all this time just really slows down a store that doesn't really spend on cashiering all that much. Tap to pay can shave off a few seconds on every transaction (ever been behind someone in the store who finally pulls out their wallet, finds the business end of their card, inserts it, waits 20 seconds...).
Millions of transactions a day, over thousands of stores, it can make a huge difference in time saved.
This is even worse now that tap to pay has proliferated. Customers who are not Walmart regulars (and some that are) will wave their credit card, phone, or watch over the terminal and wonder why it’s not working.
Cashier must explain: No tap. Best case is the customer shrugs and inserts card. Bad case is the customer is confused or argues about it. Horrible case is that the customer must fish through his belongings for a credit card or cash and takes minutes to realize he has neither.
I guess Walmart figured that these scenes repeating daily was not worth whatever its strategy was.
> Apple has changed its policies since the lawsuit was filed. As of iOS 18.1, developers are able to offer NFC contactless payments in their apps.
The lawsuit was files in 2022, and apple opened access to the NFC chip in 2024 (iOS 18.1). Searching I could find alternative wallet apps that offer contactless payments, but only in EEA, eg [0, 1, 2]. It is supposed to be accessible in the US, but I am not sure why there are no apps there, unless I have missed them.
IANAL but if access to NFC is open since 2024 and (assumingly) the amount banks etc pay for apple pay has not really decreased, wouldn't that mean that their main argument is not really substantive?
It is estimated Apple Pay does anywhere between $5T to $10T transaction per year. That is everything from Credit Card to Debit Card. If we average out at 0.1% per transaction over $5T, that is $5B per year.
The transaction itself doesn't touch any Apple severs. In case anyone is wondering if there is an operational cost. There is a set up cost though with the initial verification and sometimes Apple do charge a one time fee per card set up.
There is a privacy angle with using Apple Pay. But I am unsure how much info banks and network is not getting because of it.
Retailers may get less than using their own app, but I agree I don’t really see how it affects the processors or the banks.
However Apple is providing something in all this. Apple Pay requires biometrics which (in theory) should help lower fraud costs for everyone. So it’s not like they’re just rent seeking for nothing.
I don’t know how it went for everyone else, but I don’t remember tapped pay getting popular until after Apple Pay and Apple pushing it. I know that coincided with when EMV terminals really started to get popular because the credit card companies were forcing it. But I honestly wonder if they helped push it to the mainstream, even for people just using tap cards.
Pix and the other variants are the way to go for money transfer, it's just that these monopolies won't be happy to forfeit their easy money, both credit, banks as well as Apple. They are all fighting for monopolies, they must cease to exist for the good of the common folk.
Well, fortunately Pix is statedriven/stateenforced/strateregulated, so it contains some of the most important ingredients to become some type of standard - the only reason why Mastercard et.al. are so powerful is because this area/field of tech was long no recognised as critical/relevant enough.
Pix is doing exactly the right thing, as ECB/SEPA is as well.
Totally, and hopefully if standardisation isn't possible that we will at least see some form of integration between these systems, even if under an international transaction fee.
The national co-integration is actually not a problem,asmost modern stacks are build on ISO20022 mainly, to the basis for co-integraion exists. Its just that attention on these topics is not that big. You could easily connect Brazil to the ECB with a correct setup.
I find this technology fascinating, I'm looking for different fields to apply myself to, if there's job openings for developing Pix here in Brazil I think I'll look into the tech more carefully.
Initially I was casually (didn’t dig into the issue) fine with Apple allowing only a single access to payment via NFC due to the opportunity for fraud, which was Apple’s justification.
But I haven’t heard of it happening with the wild-west Android NFC payments, much less widespread problems with the essentially unconstrained use of QR code payments on SE Asia (e.g. Alipay).
So as an iPhone user I’m happy for Apple’s lockdown going away. I just hope it doesn’t mean that in future I’ll need to install a dozen payment apps and have to figure out which when I buy things.
If the banks win and other stuff is allowed on the iPhone, that’s fine.
I have no intention of using it. I have a feeling it’ll be crap. That’s how this stuff usually is. And I’m absolutely not going to use a different app for each card.
So I wonder if this will end up being a Pyrrhic victory.
The only time the People have anything in our sick phony republic protected is when their interests happen to coincidentally align with those of an adversarial oligarch. Not interested in digging through the 15 layers of competing interests, corporate spin, lies, and economics to determine if that’s the case here but it’s sad in any case that stories like this are the only hope we the People have of getting any crumbs out of this system.
I get why the banks are not happy, but I can tell them that I am not going to use Chase Wallet, Bank of America Wallet, Citi Wallet...just pay the fee and be thankful for the reduced payment friction, which they invariably make money from. PS: Nobody is going to use Paze (yet another half baked wallet), other than to collect the free $10 to sign up for it.
Somewhat related, even Walmart relented and now supports Apple Pay/Contactless. Every big merchant has now relented (Kroger, Home Depot, Walmart).
Or Apple Pay can just be like Google Wallet is on Android? The alternative is not multiple apps.
There is already apple wallet where i can put any of my banking cards…
I have used both but I dont know the difference
How does it work on Google Wallet?
Article says Google wallet works just like Apple Pay, except they don’t charge a 0.15% fee.
Another alternative (in the US, at least) is tapping a piece of plastic instead of your phone and not inviting any of the tech giants into your transactions at all. What an unforced error, to shovel more of your data at them needlessly.
> is tapping a piece of plastic instead of your phone and not inviting any of the tech giants into your transactions at all.
Apple doesn't see individual transactions when Apple Pay is used at retail stores' tap-to-pay terminals. The secret card payment token is sent from the phone to the credit-card's issuing bank and bypasses Apple servers. In this way, using Apple Pay is more secure and private than plastic cards because the real card number details remains hidden from the merchant.
The iPhone does contact Apple servers to add a new card to the digital wallet. Apple servers then contacts the issuing bank to get the secret token the bank generates and then puts it in the digital wallet. Conceivably, the "add a new card to digital wallet" could also have been done without Apple in the middle but it would require a much more convoluted, less secure, and more user-hostile workflow to do it. (e.g. the end user would have to know what bank endpoint to contact, manually enter the long and cryptic digits of the secret token, or maybe scan a QR code on a computer screen that's vulnerable to interception and phishing.)
All EMV transactions (including Apple Pay in a tap to pay scenario) don’t give the retailer the full card number.
Importantly, this provides a degree of protection from compromised PoS terminals. Ever since I switched to nearly exclusively using Apple Pay for physical shopping I’ve had no unauthorized charges, whereas back when I was still tapping, inserting, or swiping my card I’d need to call and get a card or two replaced almost every year.
Inserting and tapping is just as safe.
Swiping is where the risk is.
Or (common in the US) handing your card to a restaurant waiter who walks off with it to do the charge
don’t be silly, apple displays me exact amount on the screen, in plain fucking text, after each transaction - that’s crazy you wrote this
This information comes from the card issuer directly, after the transaction has completed. It usually requires the mobile banking app to be installed.
The wallet app has a way to get the information, but it’s not from the tap itself. The tap interaction is not able to provide this information back to the phone (because the transaction auth happens long after the tap interaction completes).
Taps are designed to work with fully offline devices (which is why you can tap a plastic card, it is powered by the card terminal for the duration of the tap only, and requires no online interaction)
Man, its amazing how confident you are about this, considering I know individual people who independently work at Visa, Mastercard, AND Apple, who have worked on mobile payments who independently confirm that none of them know any personal info and that its all pass-through.
So, are you sure you know what you are talking about?
This kind of appeal to authority [believe me because I say so!] doesn't really add much information, does it?
The report, above, is that previous transactions are visible within Apple's payment app. Apple agrees[1]. I'm willing to accept that this observation is based on reality and that it is reported in good faith.
Meanwhile, the suggestion is that Apple has no knowledge of transaction history.
Is there a way in which these two seemingly-conflicting concepts can be constructively combined into an understandable whole?
[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/104954
(For my part, I've never used Apple Pay and it's possible that I never will. I do not have a dog in this race.)
This is baffling, there's all sorts of information on my phone that Apple has zero knowledge of, why would the transactions be different?
Do you think Apple has complete copies of everything? I don't understand where this supposed contradiction is supposed to exist, unless you think that Apple has complete knowledge of all phone contents, which would require complete ignorance of the entire platform.
That is much better, but you're still paying visa/mastercard some percentage fee for a service which should be provided by e.g. the central bank.
Yeah. But this is the US. This is all we’ve got. Having the central bank do it would be communism, and that’s bad. I learned about it from Saturday morning cartoons.
Ironically it's the central bank (and associated regulations) that cause these intermediaries to exist to begin with.
A protocol to support decentralized payments is a hobby project for an individual. You give each institution an identifier (e.g. their domain name) and each institution gives each customer an account number. If you're account 123 at Chase then you sign in as #123@chase.com, tell Chase you want to send $5 to #456@bankofamerica.com, they send the money and Bank of America tells their customer they have a new deposit. If you want to collect money from someone, you tell your bank to send their bank a payment request and they can either approve it manually (e.g. so you can deliver the goods for a one-time purchase) or configure some rules for which accounts get approved automatically up to some threshold amount (e.g. for recurring payments). Also no reason for banks in different countries not to all support the same protocol.
That doesn't require a central bank or any third party payments intermediary. All it requires is for banks to know how to send money to other banks, which they obviously already do and the specific implementation of that isn't even relevant to the customer-facing payments protocol. So how does this not exist? It can't be that no one wants it, so it's got to be that someone (e.g. Visa/MasterCard) doesn't want it.
yea, feels like tech giants do not have access to this already? they know where you are and what you do every second of every day, keeping away from ( while they know I was a target ) what was the amount on my receipt is really giving it to them :)
Remember CurrenC? The thing a bunch of them tried to make that failed horribly during test with no consumers liking it? If I remember a description it involved using an app where you had to scan a QR code, and then the point of sale terminal had to scan a QR code on your phone or something like that.
It was all so hilariously badly designed compared to tap and pay.
This is the government's problem. I tend to be on the side of less government, but it is so obvious that payment facilitation should be a service provided by the government. The government is just allowing corporations to collect rents, because they are lazy and incompetent.
They’re more like taxes than rents. It’s a constant cost applied to all goods because of the ubiquity of use means we pay with or without playing the credit card/payments game.
It's not a government problem, it's a competition problem. Fundamentally 1-3% is actually a very competitive rate for organizing the easy transfer of money and handling fraud. Merchants would rather the cost be free, and banks may want a larger slice of the pie, but until someone comes up with a better way of paying money for both sides this is the best we have. If government got involved all that could happen is fees would increase and then we'd miss out on future efficiency improvements and savings.
> Fundamentally 1-3% is actually a very competitive rate for organizing the easy transfer of money and handling fraud
This is a very US-centric take. In the UK, EU and Australia, interchange rates are capped at more like 0.2/0.3%.
That actually proves the point, because a market left to itself arrives at 2-3%, and it only goes lower if the government is dictating a rate.
0% because it’s a service that’s so obviously should be provided by the government is better.
A possible compromise is to allow Apple Pay to be a monopoly as long as it doesn't charge any fees.
How about I do you one better compromise: create a payment network that don't rely on private institutions rent seeking behavior, like Pix in Brazil.
Now do developers.
I don't really care about any of Apple's business partners being upset about their business terms with Apple. Developers want a bigger cut, banks want a bigger cut, Foxconn wants a bigger cut.
My interests as an Apple user are aligned with Apple. But even if I wasn't an Apple user, market forces determine what the "fair" cut is for everyone.
Another argument for turning finance into a public utility. Instead we have different factions of rentier capital competing for who gets to parasitize us.
>Another argument for turning finance into a public utility
There already is a public option in the US, FedNow. In EU there's SEPA instant.
Not quite. FedNow is public payment infrastructure for institutions. Apple Pay is consumer-facing.
granted i am a bit of schadenfreude at the thought of poor poor megabanks having to pay....fees...
Ultimately it comes out of their customers’ wallets.
Probably, but there is an upper limit on what people will be able to tolerate, everyone is aware of it and capitalism is trying to make products that meet it.
So, it’s not unlimited cost here.
The fact right now is that handling cash is more expensive than handling card- even with the fees, which is why Sweden, Estonia etc; are essentially cash-free countries.
At some point the fee’s will make you break-even I guess?
n
I would use my non-profit credit union Wallet if it meant less fees on their end.
Walmart only relented because they finally broke through the final missing link of the contactless issue. They got customers conned into giving their phone numbers at checkout, just like it's the grocery store.
Cards get linked to accounts automatically behind the scenes based on first6/last4 card number tracking, then everyone else self-selects to punch their phone number on the screen.
Same reason Walmart Radio is such gruesome auditory cancer, it's part of the data collection and advertising vehicle.
That could be part of the reason, but also I think insisting on chip all this time just really slows down a store that doesn't really spend on cashiering all that much. Tap to pay can shave off a few seconds on every transaction (ever been behind someone in the store who finally pulls out their wallet, finds the business end of their card, inserts it, waits 20 seconds...).
Millions of transactions a day, over thousands of stores, it can make a huge difference in time saved.
This is even worse now that tap to pay has proliferated. Customers who are not Walmart regulars (and some that are) will wave their credit card, phone, or watch over the terminal and wonder why it’s not working.
Cashier must explain: No tap. Best case is the customer shrugs and inserts card. Bad case is the customer is confused or argues about it. Horrible case is that the customer must fish through his belongings for a credit card or cash and takes minutes to realize he has neither.
I guess Walmart figured that these scenes repeating daily was not worth whatever its strategy was.
> Apple has changed its policies since the lawsuit was filed. As of iOS 18.1, developers are able to offer NFC contactless payments in their apps.
The lawsuit was files in 2022, and apple opened access to the NFC chip in 2024 (iOS 18.1). Searching I could find alternative wallet apps that offer contactless payments, but only in EEA, eg [0, 1, 2]. It is supposed to be accessible in the US, but I am not sure why there are no apps there, unless I have missed them.
IANAL but if access to NFC is open since 2024 and (assumingly) the amount banks etc pay for apple pay has not really decreased, wouldn't that mean that their main argument is not really substantive?
[0] paypal @germany https://www.macrumors.com/2025/05/13/paypal-contactless-paym...
[1] curve pay @eu(?) https://www.macrumors.com/2025/05/23/curve-pay-launches-ipho...
[2] Vipps mobilepay @norway https://vippsmobilepay.com/en-NO/news/2024/12/09/vippsmobile...
It is estimated Apple Pay does anywhere between $5T to $10T transaction per year. That is everything from Credit Card to Debit Card. If we average out at 0.1% per transaction over $5T, that is $5B per year.
The transaction itself doesn't touch any Apple severs. In case anyone is wondering if there is an operational cost. There is a set up cost though with the initial verification and sometimes Apple do charge a one time fee per card set up.
There is a privacy angle with using Apple Pay. But I am unsure how much info banks and network is not getting because of it.
Retailers may get less than using their own app, but I agree I don’t really see how it affects the processors or the banks.
However Apple is providing something in all this. Apple Pay requires biometrics which (in theory) should help lower fraud costs for everyone. So it’s not like they’re just rent seeking for nothing.
I don’t know how it went for everyone else, but I don’t remember tapped pay getting popular until after Apple Pay and Apple pushing it. I know that coincided with when EMV terminals really started to get popular because the credit card companies were forcing it. But I honestly wonder if they helped push it to the mainstream, even for people just using tap cards.
I hope we get tap to pay on GrapheneOS in the US soon. You can already use it in the EU with Curve and PayPal. It's a blocker for a lot of people.
Hacker News seems generally not interested in private payments or how terrible the banking system is, which is disappointing.
https://eylenburg.github.io/payments.htm
There's walt, which will be launching soon.
https://walt.is/
Dunno if my comment updated, but it's actually walt.
https://walt.is/
Pix and the other variants are the way to go for money transfer, it's just that these monopolies won't be happy to forfeit their easy money, both credit, banks as well as Apple. They are all fighting for monopolies, they must cease to exist for the good of the common folk.
Well, fortunately Pix is statedriven/stateenforced/strateregulated, so it contains some of the most important ingredients to become some type of standard - the only reason why Mastercard et.al. are so powerful is because this area/field of tech was long no recognised as critical/relevant enough.
Pix is doing exactly the right thing, as ECB/SEPA is as well.
Totally, and hopefully if standardisation isn't possible that we will at least see some form of integration between these systems, even if under an international transaction fee.
Working in this field:
The national co-integration is actually not a problem,asmost modern stacks are build on ISO20022 mainly, to the basis for co-integraion exists. Its just that attention on these topics is not that big. You could easily connect Brazil to the ECB with a correct setup.
I find this technology fascinating, I'm looking for different fields to apply myself to, if there's job openings for developing Pix here in Brazil I think I'll look into the tech more carefully.
Initially I was casually (didn’t dig into the issue) fine with Apple allowing only a single access to payment via NFC due to the opportunity for fraud, which was Apple’s justification.
But I haven’t heard of it happening with the wild-west Android NFC payments, much less widespread problems with the essentially unconstrained use of QR code payments on SE Asia (e.g. Alipay).
So as an iPhone user I’m happy for Apple’s lockdown going away. I just hope it doesn’t mean that in future I’ll need to install a dozen payment apps and have to figure out which when I buy things.
If the banks win and other stuff is allowed on the iPhone, that’s fine.
I have no intention of using it. I have a feeling it’ll be crap. That’s how this stuff usually is. And I’m absolutely not going to use a different app for each card.
So I wonder if this will end up being a Pyrrhic victory.
The problem is if merchants stop accepting Apple Pay or any other privacy-supporting payment system.
https://whatispix.com/
The only time the People have anything in our sick phony republic protected is when their interests happen to coincidentally align with those of an adversarial oligarch. Not interested in digging through the 15 layers of competing interests, corporate spin, lies, and economics to determine if that’s the case here but it’s sad in any case that stories like this are the only hope we the People have of getting any crumbs out of this system.