On Square using iPhone audio jack to read credit cards

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24 points·tosh··13 comments

The story of all these unicorns really is you have to be willing to play in the grey.

From move fast and break things, to avoiding regulations without the law coming down on you.

What’s the grey here?

Stripe was not the first to do something like this with an audio jack, but honestly it shows how important/useful open and standards can be.

It’s even more a shame to see them replaced by proprietary or extremely complex standards. For example the complexity of web standards has pretty much reduced browsers to only a very small number of browser engines.

Square

Stripe didn't invent this, but hey, if you keep worshipping the unicorns and be inspired by them, it'll be your turn soon!

You are correct, Stripe didn’t start selling physical card readers until 2018.

I was screwing around with magstripe readers two decades ago, and the PC audio jack was the obvious port to connect them to. If I recall, it only takes a little signal conditioning and you're good to go.

Who said anything about Stripe?

Square

So that's why they killed the audio jack on modern phones.

They could have used the audio part of the lightning plug

The Lightning plug came with all the limitations from Apple. That’s what they wanted to avoid.

Unlikely. The next square-like-unicorn could still use an el-cheapo Bluetooth audio for the same thing in the same way (or some other Bluetooth protocol like a keyboard). It won't be quite as cheep as an audio plug, but it will still be cheap enough for the cost to be dominated by other things.

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