Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/04/27/apple-cash.html
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Google Wallet already works. (but works best if you link it to your bank/credit union debit card rather than that same card’s checking account!). Also be mindful that it is your financial institution that puts default limits (which you can ask to be changed) on how much can be withdrawn at a time.
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iMoneyLaunder?
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So no one else should try to compete? And I really don’t want google knowing what I purchase, or whom I send money to, thanks.
What’s the difference between this and ApplePay?
Everyone should compete! We win when there’s competition. Which is why I’ve kicked Paypal, Venmo and others to the curb.
Not to mention free transfers under (if I remember correctly) $300.
I think the main difference is you can use it to send money between your contacts, rather than between yourself and a merchant. You can probably also accept payments, too.
There’s probably a half-decent market for this. My sister (who’s not exactly the first to try new tech) has a square account she uses to get payments from her fellow PTA members when they do events and so on. I bet there are a lot of clubs and associations out there who’d appreciate a service like that that “just worked”, though it better be able to accept payments from / pay to non apple users!
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“would allow iPhone owners to send money digitally to other iPhone owners”
So… out here in the real world where I have no idea and really don’t care whether the person I need/want to send money to has an iphone, I guess I’ll just keep using one of the many, many, existing services that don’t fucking care what fucking operating system anyone’s phone happens to be running in order to transfer money to them?
Coming soon: buying drug’s with your iPhone.
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My cat sitter has an iPhone. Most of my family, too. Right now in Canada, the preferred way to send a few bucks is “Interac online”, which generates an email to your recipient with a unique question/answer you supply, transferring directly between banks.
I’d love to take the email bits out of that and just send an imessage over my sis can validate with TouchID when I need to pay her back for something. And I doubt I’m alone in that.
Canada, though, is very different from the US. W’re quite cashless, and because there’s just five major banks everything is interconnected and tap-to-pay and chip & pin has already been here for many years, so I can get how this might be less appealing in the USA.
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That will be interesting to watch.
With ‘iMessage’, Apple(whether by luck or malignant genius, I’m not sure) managed to arouse a surprising amount of visceral loathing among iDevice users for filthy green SMSes.
Whether that was the plan the first time around; or just a happy accident; I can’t imagine that they’d skip the opportunity to try to achieve more of the same handy effect with payments. The real question will just be whether they cut out non-iDevices entirely; or whether they support them(possibly as a way of bludgeoning Android users into getting Apple IDs); but have a set of UI cues that suggests that any transaction originating or terminating with a non-Apple device is approximately as secure as handing a shady character in a sin city back alley a wad of grimy bills.
Given your average Android OEM’s approach to firmware updates, this charge won’t exactly be dishonest; but it’ll probably be a bit more theatrical than the approach taken by payment services that are motivated to go where the users are(paypal, venmo, etc.)
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I think I actually prefer the interac approach to that of something like squarecash/cashme - while that app is incredibly seamless (bank to bank and phone OS independent without pesky email validation), it falls over nastily when you send money to the wrong person. Eg, I recently needed to send money to Ben Rarename, found only one person by that name with a cashme account so sent the money, then discovered there was more than one Ben Rarename in the world and the person who I wanted to send money to had had to register under Benjamin Rarename. The person who I’d sent it to decided to refuse to return the money, and square just said ‘we can’t do anything, you need to go to your bank and have them revoke the charge’. The whole thing was sorted out eventually, but it took over three months and about 30 emails. A little more ‘friction’ might have been a good thing.
That’s a fair point.
Apple likes to say that they only want to enter a market if they have a chance to make the “best” version of something. So, if they even are doing this, here’s hoping they’ve thought about that specific issue.
I think this “wins” vs. systems that “just work” if buyer/seller both belong to the same bank, or if buyer/seller both have the same cross platform app installed and setup if the installed base of iPhone owners with a recent iOS is larger then the other populations.
After all it doesn’t really make much difference in “can I use it” if the question is “bank with chase” v. “Is that an iPhone?”
Actually there the edge goes to the iPhone because sometimes you can tell that by looking.
It could work out well, or it could be the next Apple Wallet.
Surprised the banks didn’t just set this up a long time ago. In Sweden they did, the system is called Swish. You link your back account to your mobile phone number and can send to anyone’s registed Swish mobile account.
Money is instantly transferred directly, account to account, with no Venmo/PayPal escrow-like intermediary.
Some merchants accept payments this way.
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Denmark has MobilePay https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MobilePay. Everbody uses it, quite a few vendors, too. In this system the phone number (not the person) is registered so you don’t pay the wrong person.
So what’s the Apple Pay for ? How it different from new service ?
Not the first attempt at this sort of thing. It certainly has that potential, but since it will still rely on a bank account it should still ping on the banks’ monitoring systems.
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