They’re tapping their phone at the terminal and laughing at me or the merchants fumbling with the QR codes.
I think that there are ways to work with Apple nowadays to get around their NFC restrictions, which has for almost a decade been the primary reason to not do custom ISO-14443/18092 implementations and instead lift off of EMV.
In the past, developing a (rights-free!) broad standard on top of that would take ~18 months - I know because I've done it, more than once. I think that today, this can be done in half of the time because a PoC phase can be done very rapidly if the design phase is done right. Because you can get an NFC reader + controller for 30k-40k sats today, it means that over a timeframe of 3 years, we can go from zero to deployment anywhere: all the hardware exists.
The main obstacles:
Consumer-side closed ecosystems
Patent trolls (proximity comms space is filled with these)
I think that there are ways to work with Apple nowadays to get around their NFC restrictions, which has for almost a decade been the primary reason to not do custom ISO-14443/18092 implementations and instead lift off of EMV.
In the past, developing a (rights-free!) broad standard on top of that would take ~18 months - I know because I've done it, more than once. I think that today, this can be done in half of the time because a PoC phase can be done very rapidly if the design phase is done right. Because you can get an NFC reader + controller for 30k-40k sats today, it means that over a timeframe of 3 years, we can go from zero to deployment anywhere: all the hardware exists.
The main obstacles: