NFC might soon take the ‘tap’ out of tap-to-pay.
That defeats the whole purpose. We have Bluetooth for that.
Respectfully, did you read the article? They’re talking about NFC increasing the range from ~5mm to 30mm. It’s not about competing with Bluetooth use cases, it’s about an improvement in the user experience with contactless payments and door access, etc.
That’s a very welcome improvement. At my last job, I was responsible for an app that could (among other healthcare related things) read German health insurance cards. The first version used an external smartcard reader through bluetooth, usb or lightning. That worked reasonably well but required the user to buy those rather expensive readers. Since newer cards support nfc, I tried implementing that. It kind if worked but you had to place the card in pretty much exactly the right spot (which differs from phone to phone so we couldn’t even give good instructions) and hold it there for a few seconds because the cryptographic handshake was rather slow. Having a bit more wiggle room would improve the ux by a lot.
It’s an increase to 30mm…
NFC might soon take the ‘tap’ out of tap-to-pay.
I can’t think of anything worse. I don’t want to walk past a payment kiosk and accidentally pay for who knows what.
Is it really a big problem right now?
Like we have Bluetooth for medium range, wifi for long range, and NFC for short range.
I would argue it’s a feature.“Long range” in this case is 30mm to make smacking your phone on the pad less frustrating.
