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Comment by jaredcwhite | Hacker News Reader

The importance of this cannot be overstated. ~25 years after the web was first popularized, we have an open payments layer API that is supported by the most popular mobile wallet.

I know Apple Pay's killer app when it was first announced was the ability to pay easily in-store, but I feel like this is actually a bigger deal. I never had much annoyance with whipping out a card at a grocery store, but paying for things online in a way that's ridiculously fast as well as secure has always been a dicey proposition. This is a huge leap forward.

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Agreed, it's fun to use my phone to pay in the store, but not needing to input my address and cc details feels like magic.

> open payments layer API that is supported by the most popular mobile wallet

Does it only support Apple Pay? Kinda of a downgrade from Chrome and the W3 specification:

https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/payments/

https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-request/

Oh, and WeChat Pay has 600 million active users, far more than Apple Pay:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/744944/mobile-payment-pl...

It’s the same W3C API, where do you see that this is Apple-only API?

“We’re pleased to announce that Safari 11.1 on macOS and Safari on iOS 11.3 now support the W3C Payment Request API for conducting Apple Pay transactions on the web.”

What did you think they would do, support basic-card?

How would they present that and make it clear to users that that’s far less secure than Apple Pay? Why would they do that?

Wasn’t this API basically invented to provide a standard complaint way of doing something like Apple Pay? Here you go.

> Wasn’t this API basically invented to provide a standard complaint way of doing something like Apple Pay? Here you go.

No, the API invented so that the browser could act as an intermediary between many payment-requesting services and payment services, such as PayPal, PayTM, Apple Pay, etc.

They chose to limit support exclusively to Apple Pay, so that users won't have a choice.

W3 hasn't really cared about user rights for the past year or two, so I imagine it's a lot closer to what MBCook thought it was for.

Yes it was invented to act as an intermediary so people didn’t have to fill out 30 form fields correctly. But that didn’t happen UNTIL Apple made their own and everyone else decided they wanted one too. As far as I’m aware it was never proposed before Apple Pay existed.

This is not a case of “embrace and extend“ where Apple took something open and locked it down. This is a case of where existing functionality is now available any standards compliant way instead of having to use Apple’s custom JavaScript calls.

User still have the choice of entering their credit cards the same way they have for the last 20+ years. It’s not like you’re forcing ALL payment on the web through this.

I notice you didn’t propose a suggestion to the security/UI delima I mentioned. I am 100% willing to bet that’s why they didn’t add basic-card support. And it seems like a good decision to me.

This is a brand new API that basically no one uses. If websites start using it because they want to support Apple Pay and see it will be easier to support other payment methods on other browsers… isn’t that a benefit?

I don’t see how this is anything but a very positive move compared to the official way to support Apple Pay last month.

You do notice that this has been implemented on Chrome already, supporting multiple payment apps or methods? But Apple decided to exclusively support Apple Pay on Safari, both on mobile and desktop?

> But that didn’t happen UNTIL Apple made their own and everyone else decided they wanted one too.

Please, PayPal has had it for over a decade...

Or, as someone from Apple wrote:

> The ability for apps like PayPal to handle payments in the browser requires the Payment Handler API [1]. We aren't announcing support for Payment Handler here, just Payment Request.

> It's not like we're actively restricting or blocking these apps, we just haven't written the code to do this.

This API was written by Microsoft, Google, and Facebook. Apple merely implemented it worst and (nearly) last, as usual. https ://www.w3.org/TR/payment-request/

Edge's implentation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/dev-guide/wi... Chrome's implementation: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/payments/

Last time I checked the Payment API it was pretty low level, for example you'd get CC numbers. Processing that would then require PCI-DSS compliance so you'd likely still need a payment processor like Stripe. Payment API just provided a nicer UI for your cards and maybe virtual numbers in case of Google Wallet.

OP here.

You’d only get a card number when using the “basic-card” payment method, which Safari does not support.

Apple Pay provides a payment token instead, which does not reveal your physical card number.

Second that.. That's a huge improvement and massively under-appreciated aspect of real-world Apple Pay as well.

Basically you don't have to worry anymore about merchants getting hacked and getting card numbers stolen, because the tokens they use in place of card numbers are tied to iPhone-based authentication (device possession + PIN/biometrics).

Seems like all the marketing around Apple Pay is about convenience, but security is a big part of the story.

Let me guess...as a merchant you are pretty much doomed if Apple doesn't like you. I find the blockchain payments way better for both merchant and buyer. No more 3 digits secret codes.

You guessed wrong! Apple's deal is with the card issuers, so the only people doomed by Apple's disfavor are customers with cards from banks that haven't adopted Apple Pay. Apple has no say over which merchant can use it.

Also I think you missed the part where Apple Pay doesn't involve 3 digit CVVs.

The merchant and/or processor also have to be registered, although I don’t think that’s too much of a hassle.

I added basic bitcoin functionality to our store a few years back. About 1% of customers chose it, and nobody really paid attention to it.

Then, payments would just stop getting through unless customers were willing to spend $40 (on a $60 purchase). That ended our little experiment. I couldn't care less about credit card companies' unwillingness to deal in child porn and Nazi propaganda. For us, they simply work.

The decentralised nature of Bitcoin has also been proven to be mythological anyway. You can't use it (or any other cryptocurrency) without access to centralised services for exchange and other services. And those companies will adopt the same policies as CC companies and banks as they grow larger, professionalize, and draw scrutiny.

The only positive was the small fortune that had accrued in the meantime. The earliest orders had exchange rates of around $100:1BC. We didn't care about it December or so, and got lucky again in that the problems with transaction costs both coincided with BC's peak and were the reason for us to cash out.

How about their unwillingness to deal with Wikileaks? Or the legal marijuana industry? Or the legal sex industry?

Maybe you were trying to be flippant, but it came off as somewhere between ignorance and slander.

I feel like tokenization was in use before Apple Pay, but it certainly gained in usage after the introduction.

"most popular mobile wallet"

Citation? PayPal/Venmo seem far, far ahead.

Venmo is not a mobile wallet. It's for bank transfers (i.e. ACH), not credit/debit card payments.

PayPal is widely supported online but I doubt they are far, far ahead in the real world, which I think is what people mean by "mobile" wallet.

Your statement regarding the "real world" being equated to "mobile payments" is confusing. FWIW, PayPal cleared $155B in pure mobile payments volume in 2017. Apple Pay on the other hand hasn't published any numbers (apart from a 450% "growth" which every analyst knows is a cop out because the raw numbers themselves are likely not impressive.)

Just guessing based on my experience, but it seems like Apple Pay has broader worldwide adoption than Venmo, which is tied to the US banking system.

This is the most recent useful data I could find on short notice: https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-pay-users-nearly-double-in-2...

Between Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, and Android Pay (which I believe recently got rebranded as just Google Pay), Apple Pay is ahead in userbase numbers by a considerable margin — perhaps not as much now as a year ago, but I doubt it was overtaken.

WeChat and Alipay both dwarf all of the above. Pity they don’t strive to be more accepted in the West.

Because there's no market. For physical transactioms EMV does everything they do, and in a more convenient package. For online transactions, they're not more convenient than the incumbents.

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