Comment by pitchlatte
13 hours ago
blows my mind that there’s not a single open solution for mobile wallets and nobody is saying anything.
13 hours ago
blows my mind that there’s not a single open solution for mobile wallets and nobody is saying anything.
You have to negotiate directly with Visa to convince them why they should accept your system. How will you convince them?
We desperately need to break Visa's stranglehold on access to the consumer side of commerce. As long as everyone's only innovating and competing on the merchant side of things, we're not really going to get anywhere.
You're free to make your own card network. How will you convince banks to issue your cards and merchants to accept them?
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Are you prepared to protect customers by refunding them if they are victims of fraud when using your payment system? Visa and MasterCard are prepared to do that. That's how they could convince consumers to use their cards without worrying.
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so what you're saying is we should be looking at competitors of Visa
MasterCard has the exact same issue.
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Because a normal card is superior in most practical cases?
Haven't used a normal card in over a decade. I don't think my bank actually makes physical cards anymore, last time my card expired I just had a popup in the bank app that told me I have a new card. This was like 2-3 years ago. I use Google/Android Pay (or whatever it's called now) for NFC payments and have since 2018 and never carried a physical card since.
I would never use a physical card with NFC anyway because it is both inconvenient (have to enter PIN every 5 transactions) and insecure (for transactions without PIN there's no verification layer), whereas on my phone I have to unlock it for every transaction no matter how small, and doing so is a small matter of pressing my finger on the fingerprint reader.
I'm as anti-capitalist as they come but this is kind of a lost fight in my mind because if not Google - then Visa/Mastercard and the bank itself will know every transaction I make anyway.
I'm starting to come the the same conclusion, but not for practical reasons. My thinking is about privacy. If I buy some chocolates from retailer X (with or without their loyalty system), these parties will know what I purchased and where: The retailer, the bank, the merchant (visa/mc), wallet provider (Google/Apple/Samsung). Any upstream 3rd parties for analytics, big data warehouses, ai companies (fraud detection, spending predictions), marketing companies, research companies, manufacturers. Then there are bluetooth beacons, microphones, cameras, facial recognition, keyboard/screen capture (Gboard, Samsung Keyboard, Whatsapp texts). Then there is sms and popup notification on device that gets ingested by x amount of systems too. So the whole pipe just exists to gather as much as possible data to sell me more stuff. Having a card will take some of them out of the loop or less rich metadata than using a digital wallet.
A card is a good step to reduce that. I want to go farther and pay cash as much as possible, but it's not trivial to manage when all I have is a pocket full of coins. Is there a 3D printed wallet with slots sized for European coins so you can quickly identify and extract the coins you need instead of rummaging through a mixed pocket?
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It is? I haven’t carried my wallet around in years, because Apple Wallet does everything I need. Concert tickets, boarding passes, bank cards, public transport cards, etc. A physical wallet and cards in comparison feels like stone age technology.
Yes it is. Doesn't break if drop it for one. Much smaller than a phone. Isn't tied to apples ecosystem. etc.
I get that you might want one if you are a tech maximalist with a single focus. But that doesn't mean you should stop carrying your card.
Don't you still have to carry cards for things that aren't digitally excepted, such as a drivers license in most states?
And your battery goes empty, and you just lost everything. Or your phone falls to the ground and breaks.
And to add to payments, the store loyalty apps are the worst... Lidl over here has an app only (no physical loyalty card), and they should be hanged for developing that... first of all, you're waiting in line while a grandma takes her phone out of her purse, then unlock it, and of course android is not satisfied with her fingerprint right then but also wants a pin... then all apps, then scroll down to L, find LidlPlus app, tap on it... QR code? Nope, not yet! First you get a daily coupon wheel of fortune, tap, wait for it to spin, see what your award is... and if it's something that she just bought, she has to manually activate that coupon in the menu (again, tap, find, tap, tap back), and then click the card button to get the qr code to scan... it's literally minutes sometimes of just waiting, instead of scanning a simple qr code on a plastic card pulled from the wallet.
We even had one of our telcos break down (full internet loss, country wide), POS terminals not working at all, and there are actually people with zero cash with them, not even like 50 euros (for just-in-case (like this))... and then you have to wait for them to turn around, take their stuff back and go home hungry.
Banks and card networks will only accept proprietary shitware as payment. Would you rather keep the malware confined to a separate processor chip or would you let it run on your phone?
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No it’s not, all of my and my extended family cards (for… like a decade!) are never even leave the envelope they come in. I’m not sure I personally know people who use physical cards over Google or Apple Pay. I have seen the cards being used in the wild, of course. But I’m having hard time remembering anyone I personally know who does that.
How strange that culture is so different in different places. You can just start using them, though. Literally just swipe your card whenever you would swipe your phone.
Do you guys not have wallets with card slots?
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You need them in some scenarios. For example, lots of car rental companies refuse to take anything but a physical card.
So, the argument is that it is popular? I'm not arguing against that...
That people trade anything for even just perceived convenience? That isn't news either, but it does explain a lot of the sad state of affairs we are struggling with today.
> I’m not sure I personally know people who use physical cards over Google or Apple Pay.
You live in a pretty weird bubble. (And I live in San Francisco, so I know about weird bubbles.)
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"open solution for mobile wallets"
define open wallet then