Considering how many people didn't think chip cards existed until they actually started getting rolled out, I'm not so sure. Then again, Apple does have a pretty good marketing department, so even if US Apple Pay had to be QR based (and/or use MST) to make up for lack of NFC, it might have had some impact.
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Anybody not carry the actual credit cards since using Apple Pay?
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Considering how many people didn't think chip cards existed until they actually started getting rolled out, I'm not so sure. Then again, Apple does have a pretty good marketing department, so even if US Apple Pay had to be QR based (and/or use MST) to make up for lack of NFC, it might have had some impact.
US carriers don't support carrier billing on iTunes, I know it. That's exactly my point in providing it as an example of what Apple can do when they care. Apple launched carrier billing in a country other than the US (not sure which country, though) and has rolled it out to 30 other countries without having launched it in the US yet. So when they want to, they can certainly find a more appropriate market than the US to launch a new feature for the first time. But they refuse to do so most of the time.
I wonder why they didn't think of a way to make up for the lack of NFC in the US. It would have surely lead to much higher adoption rates of Apple Pay there.
I think they assumed (somewhat correctly) that NFC would come through terminal upgrades and replacement cycles. MST is a great feature, but it is kind of a legacy technology (and Samsung bought the company that had patents on it). I think for QR-code based services, retailers would still be pushing their own over an Apple-backed one (even now, Kroger and Walmart are trying to make it happen instead of just turning on the NFC capability on their terminals).
Outside of places that have NFC-capable terminals that intentionally disabled (Kroger, Walmart, Sam's Club, Home Depot, etc.), or the places that are still doing magstripe-only (restaurants, old Square readers, some gas pumps), most places have working NFC out of the box with the current generation of terminals. The only other obstacles are places where the terminal should be customer-facing, but they have it tucked away behind a counter and take the card to insert.
At this point, outside of a few bills and the occasional trip to a store that anti-NFC, almost all of my transactions are done with Apple Pay. Every once in awhile, I'll run into a terminal that doesn't like a particular card network via contactless (Subway doesn't seem to like Discover, some other places don't seem to like Mastercard), but another card network works fine (my backup is an Amex). I'm in a decent-sized city in the Midwest, so it's not exactly like our market is always the first to get or voluntarily adopt new tech.
I do think even now, there's a lot of people that haven't even bothered to add their cards to Wallet or try Apple Pay, even though there's plenty of retailers that support NFC.
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I'm sure Apple still has enough leverage to cause trouble for US carriers that didn't want to play along, if they actually wanted to launch carrier billing. It seems more likely that they didn't really see much of a point launching here. After all, most Americans using iTunes have already stored their credit cards with Apple for purchases, and for those who don't want to, there's iTunes gift cards paid for in cash.
Apple probably would have had a reasonable chance of getting a QR based Apple Pay to be commonly accepted in the US, especially if it used the EMVco QR standard. If nothing else, it'd require little to no investment on the merchant's part given iOS and most legacy POS systems can already scan QR codes. There'd also be nothing stopping Apple from supporting NFC for international travel as well.
However, I think something like Venmo might have had a better chance. Many merchants would rather not have to accept Visa and MC, after all, and something that (a) already has significant customer penetration and (b) would let them skip paying interchange (or pay significantly less) would be extremely tempting. In fact, there's already a QR code scanning feature in that app.
The question, really, is how much of that was precisely due to Apple being in the right place at the right time. Would that level of contactless enablement have occurred had Apple not released in the US first? I think there'd definitely have been less enablement (and possibly less NFC capable hardware floating around in general, though we'll never know for sure).
Speaking of merchants hiding terminals, I pretty much saw that coming as soon as it became clear that the US wasn't doing chip and PIN. At least many will give you the terminal if you explicitly say "Apple Pay", so there's that.
I carry one eftpos card for emergencies and small corner shops that still don’t allow contactless payments. That and my driving licence Are the only things that I carry in my phone case.
Heck, I often don’t even take my phone/wallet. The watch still does Apple Pay on its own, although I have no idea how...
Heck, I often don’t even take my phone/wallet. The watch still does Apple Pay on its own, although I have no idea how...
The cards are stored on the Watch's Secure Element, just like your phone and you don't need internet connectivity to perform a transaction. Because of this, a disconnected Watch will work, as will an iPhone without signal.
Right, payments still go through. I do believe, however, that for any payments made while the watch or iphone has no connectivity you won’t get a push notification or see those payments added to the recent transaction list until the connectivity is restored.
