Apple Pay is going to get faster and more reliable

Contactless payments such as Apple Pay and sustainability in inventory control are going to get much easier with an upcoming update to the Near Field Communications (NFC) standard that will make devices connect more swiftly and support the Digital Product Passport (NDPP) specification.

The first problems the new standard solves are range and reliability. At present, standard NFC supports a range of up to 0.2 inches and the connections aren’t always robust. What that means to most of us is the need to wriggle your iPhone or Apple Watch around a little to gain connection to the payment terminal. The improved NFC increases that range to to about 3/4 of an inch for all devices and makes the connection a little more resilient; the standard is also a little faster, which means once you authorize a payment it will take place faster than it already does.

Faster connections, easier payments, and more

That range and reliability improvements aren’t just for mobile payments, of course. If you use your iPhone as a car key or have mobile transit cards in your Apple Wallet, you should get a much better experience when opening doors or catching public transit. The NFC update also comes as Apple prepares to introduce expanded support for digital IDs and in-store payments with iOS 16. The latter is interesting because while the NFC Forum didn’t say anything about it, the update does support more complex transactions over NFC — that should make it easier to use supermarket loyalty cards at the same time as Apple Pay in a single tap. The Forum calls these, “multi-purpose tap use cases where a single tap unlocks multiple functions.”

NFC Release 15 is also expected to advance new and exciting use cases, such as using your mobile phone as a payment terminal, championing sustainability and optimizing NFC use across a variety of sectors, including automotive, transit and access control. There is also support for a new feature that has been designed to meet emerging sustainability regulations: NFC Digital Product Passport (NDPP)

What is NDPP and is it safe?

Aimed at manufacturers, NDPP is a framework to allow a single NFC tag embedded in a product to store and transmit both standard and extended Digital Product Passport (DPP) data using NFC. That data includes information such as a product’s composition, origin, environmental, lifestyle, and recycling details. Most hardware manufacturers will need to begin capturing this kind of information under an incoming EU law known as the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR). The information is meant to be made available to customers, business users and recyclers and designed to boost transparency and sustainability. It will be interesting, for example, to use DPP inside future iPhones to determine where the device and its components originate – and it might be fun to explore refurbished devices to see whether components installed to return them to use have been used in different devices previously. 

That said, this kind of unique device information does sound like the kind of data that could be abused for device fingerprinting and user tracking; is there a risk of this?

Age of consent

I contacted Mike McCamon, the organization’s executive director, for more background on NDPP. I was particularly curious about the NDPP specification — could it be abused for digital device fingerprinting? That’s unlikely, said McCarmon, in part because of the nature of NFC design, which has been developed from day one to require active consent from the user.

“Security and privacy are foundational aspects of our work at the NFC Forum,” he said. “The NFC Digital Product Passport (NDPP) Specification can be thought more of a container of content than being fully descriptive of what content is included.” The support should extend use of NFC in different ways, such as in supply chain management, inventory control, or effective recycling strategies, all of which may benefit from the kind of information NDPP provides.

“And of course, even with our new extended range…, NFC Forum-capable products must be in the closest of proximity to be read. This is in addition to most NFC functionality today on mobile devices and wearables, which is only accessible following a direct user action – like a double-tap for instance. For these and the reasons above, we believe NFC Forum standards will provide the most capable, intuitive, and secure data carrier of DPP data for the market.”

For the rest of us

Millions of people use NFC every day for payments, car and hotel rooms, or even travel. That means the new NFC standard will deliver measurable benefits to consumers because it should work better than it does now. And for enterprises, the extended support for Multi-Purpose Taps should make for a variety of product and service development possibilities, particularly as Apple opens up access to NFC on its devices.

The NFC Release 15 is currently available to high-level NFC Forum member companies, including Apple, Google, Sony, and Huawei, who can now implement the improvements in their own products in advance of a public release as new iPhones appear in fall.

You can follow me on social media! Join me on BlueSky,  LinkedIn, and Mastodon.