Despite a lot of launch hype back in 2020, App Clips has been a poster child for highly engineered solutions looking for a problem. Lots of industry folks had been looking for way to make background NFC tag reading useful for the masses and hoped that App Clips would finally deliver the tap to pay without a reader device promise. You know, the NFC equivalent of QR payment apps. But that didn’t pan out. And if you look carefully you’ll see that App Clips codes, not NFC tags have become the default way to deploy App Clips.
This is easy to see in the new Starbucks JP App Clips initiative that launched May 22: codes only, no NFC tags. It makes sense because at this point people are so used to reading QR codes that learning a new, and for my money better, way to do a smartphone task just isn’t worth the trouble. But what about the trouble with App Clips? We all know that App Clips live or die, depending on the immediate availability of a robust WiFi connection. Not always easy to get in a crowded store.
Fortunately Starbucks Japan seem to have done their homework. The App Clips version loads quickly enough, asks for a mobile order name then takes the user directly to the mobile order screen with the store and ‘to go’ options pre-selected. If the user has the Starbucks app installed payment by Starbucks card is also pre-selected. Select a product from the menu and the payment is ready to tap. It’s fast for non-app users and the App Clips streamlined process may be fast enough for iOS Starbucks app users to find it useful, such as getting ‘one more drip coffee’ refills via eTickets instead of paper receipts. Little touches like that are key because if App Clips is be successful in the long run, it has to offer app users incentives to use it too.
And what about background NFC tags? To be honest it’s best to use them for things that code reading can’t do, like background NFC tag powered VAS e-receipts.
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