So I set up the touch thing again. I like it better than before, but it’s still a hassle sometimes.
When my hands are dry and clean, great! I sometimes forget and swipe, then have to do the finger thing, but that’s just a matter of training myself.
Wet hands? It’s miserable. Even if my fingers are mostly dry, it doesn’t pick up the finger. I’ve had to try multiple times while cooking. It’s a real pain. I think ultimately that’s what made me give it up before. It’s just too much of a hassle to use while actually doing stuff with your hands. Given that I cook at least multiple times a week, and I’m not sure I’ll ever use Apple Pay, it’s going off again.
I just used it at Whole Foods. My phone is linked to my Wells Fargo debit card. Although I was expecting the supermarket to have a special device for Apple Pay, one actually used the same thing that they use to swipe bank cards. The sequence went like this:
Touch my iPhone to the device
My phone screen lit up with a picture of a bank card, and also had a fingerprint picture
Then I touched my ID’d finger to the home button (don’t press button)
Then another screen appeared, which said “done”
However, the next screen wanted my PIN, so apparently we weren’t quite done
All in all, much faster than doing it with my bank card.
I’ve used it at Petco (advertised as an Apple Pay early adopted) and have used it several times at Home Depot–Home Depot isn’t listed anywhere as a participant but basically every Home Depot have NFC card readers. This makes me happy considering Apple Pay is dramatically more secure than credit cards, and I’ve already had (along with like 80m others) my information hacked due to Home Depot’s poor corporate IT security policies.
In a way I kind of wonder if Apple would be smart to explain a little clearer to people that Apple Pay is built on top of a technology many retailers already have, even those who don’t know what Apple Pay is or aren’t listed on the Apple Pay website. But maybe instead they only want to list merchants who have agreed that yes, all their stores have NFC setup and are good to go.
I’ve already talked to a lot of people who said they were looking for the Apple Pay logo on the checkout terminal, I’ve explained to them all they really need to look for is the NFC logo. By and large unless they’ve actually turned off NFC (as CVS and Rite Aid did, thus losing me as a customer) to block NFC payments (from either Apple Pay, Google Wallet, PayPal etc) anywhere that has that NFC logo you can use your iPhone to pay for stuff.
I know Apple is infamous for its walled garden, but I really hope it and Google Wallet succeed over CurrentC. Both are built on the same very open standard and thus aren’t mutually exclusively (i.e. taking Apple Pay doesn’t exclude Google Wallet or vice-versa, in fact if you’re setup for one you’re setup for both), NFC payments really are vastly better than anything else out there. Google Wallet still has a few UI tweaks to make and security tweaks I believe, but I read they were all in the works.
CurrentC on the other hand is pretty bad, it’s going to tap directly into your checking account (so none of the higher protection inherent with credit cards) and I believe the merchant still saves all the information. So it’s actually less secure than the current system, and it’s only being promoted because the merchants don’t want to pay swipe fees. Given all the hacks at places like Target, Home Depot etc I think anyone would be seriously foolish to use any technology (other than cash) not linked to a credit card at those companies, especially any where the merchant stores the identifying information themselves.