Apple was ordered on Wednesday to face a private antitrust lawsuit by payment card issuers accusing the company of thwarting competition for its Apple Pay mobile wallet.
~I thought there were third-party payment systems on the iPhone already (including ones using NFC)?
And even the convenience advantage Apple Pay enjoys should be gone on the 15 Pro at least as you can map your third-party payment app to the action button.~
As blatantly anti-competitive as it may be, I don’t want to be in a position where, if I want to pay for something with my phone, I’m forced to use whatever shitty application my bank decides to implement (I’ve had banking applications just decide to stop working for a few days, for no apparent reason; there are banks that have countless applications, each doing something slightly different, with complex, oftentimes downright hostile authentication methods, involving combinations of these apps)
I like the fact that, regardless of card I use, they’re all exposed through the same simple Wallet application, that always works.
The big difference in such a situation is that you have the freedom to choose a different bank if their payment app is bad. You do not currently have the freedom to choose a different payment app on your iPhone. This is the fundamental issue the EU and US are addressing.
For NFC, no one really does that even on Android even though NFC is available for use. Instead, in some countries they use QR-code payments to bypass the NFC limitations that Apple imposed.
One of the uses of Apple Wallet is to auto-fill web payment forms. You use any credit card you want for a great user experience, and Apple is not charging anyone