Several months back I has made a comment about NFC, well, maybe more of a reference about it.
I think more now than ever that this technology is harder to justify. The problems are slowly becoming evident but I wont bore you with that, but instead lets look at what Apple have just release in iOS 7.
The technology they have employed, which is just extending it from the Mac, is called AirDrop. This allows the user to instantly create a Peer-to-Peer ad-hoc network between another person, either over Bluetooth or WiFi. Sure, most people would think that this is just to share a contact or a file. At the end of the day it’s just data. But the premise is still the same should a transaction need to take place.
The current players such as Samsung require you to ‘bump’ your device – which is a little unnatural. Even using NFC requires you to either touch or be a few centimetres away from the device – be it another phone or terminal. Tapping still feels a little unnatural in my view.
To top it off Apple currently has, as of WWDC, around 600M iOS 6 devices out there which would give a huge leg up over the other players in the market. And if you connect the dots, Apple will has a very mature platform in which they can quickly turn-on this services. A huge advantage given the massive fragmentation and slowness of Android upgrades.
