The good thing is that we all should benefit. I've had NFC on at least my last two phones (maybe 3?), but the hardware is not ubiquitous enough to matter. I'm assuming that there's nothing locking the POS hardware into Apple Pay, and so NFC payments become a thing everyone can use.
Exceptions that Apple has negotiated "card-present" rates from banks for apple pay, because they believe touch-id, tokenized cc numbers, and the secure enclave are such an effective fraud prevention mechanism that they have shouldered extra fraud risk for the banks. I'd argue that no one in the android space can match this at scale. With the lower rates apple can either make bank or pass through better rates to merchants, which means that apple pay suddenly becomes the preferred payment method for a tonne of large merchants.
I guess what I'm asking though is can the reader differentiate between the two? My understanding is that Apple sends a one-time use card number to the reader, so maybe it's possible for the software could run some variation of a Luhn check or whatever to figure out if it's an Apple generated number, but failing that, isn't the communication protocol between the phone and the payment terminal standardized?
In other words, can a merchant reasonably accept Apple Pay without accepting Google Wallet? I'd be surprised if they could, but I don't really know -- I'm legitimately asking.
A quick bit of Google indicates ISO14443 and EMV as the relevant protocols, but I'm not 100% sure there's not some incompatible extension thing going on that would preclude treating different companies' implementations the same.
Exceptions that Apple has negotiated "card-present" rates from banks for apple pay
Somehow this has taken off as a talking point, yet all NFC secure element payment solutions qualify as "card present". Google Wallet, for example, is card present. The NFC on my card is card present.
It isn't about negotiations, but indicates the security of the presentation. NFC secure elements are considered card equivalent.
I'm in Iceland, and I don't really see them much (if ever). Chip and pin readers are the norm here, and you can completely function without cash, but I don't notice contactless options really.
I'll take this opportunity to also say that Apple Maps still don't work here. By which I mean, they don't work at all. They have no data. The entire app is little more than a graphic of a map and a UIAlertView that says "No results found".
