After a long, long dance, Île-de-France Mobilités (IDFM) confirmed that Smart Navigo, the Paris region transit card for mobile will come to Apple Pay in 2023. As usual, Le Parisien broke the story (paywall), quickly reported on French Apple centric tech blog iGeneration.
“This time, for sure, it will be done”
After a test phase, in 2022, iPhones and Apple Watches will be able to replace the plastic pass distributed by IDFM (in 2023). “We cannot yet give a precise date, because it depends on the progress of Apple’s developments in Cupertino. But this time, for sure, it will be done, “says Laurent Probst, CEO of Île-de-France Mobilités. The contract is due to be voted on this Thursday at IDFM’s board of directors…
The contract between IDFM and Apple is spread over a period of five years, with a total budget of up to €5 million dedicated to the development of new services. A budget equivalent to that allocated to Android service developments operated by Samsung with IDFM.
Le Parisien
The contract with Apple is due to be approved by IDFM directors the week of February 20, we can thank the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics for breaking the Smart Navigo on Apple Pay logjam. Le Parisien has regularly criticized IDFM’s slow rollout of mobile services: “The modernization of the ticketing system in force on public transport networks in Île-de-France is not a long quiet river.” A timeline is helpful to understand the stalemate.
October 2017: Smart Navigo mobile was announced for 2019 launch. At the time IDFM said, “Unfortunately, it won’t be possible for iPhone owners to use the service since Apple does not yet allow third parties to access the NFC secure element in their phones. However, we are happy to explore the possibilities with Apple to offer the same service to all Paris public transport users.” In other words, IDFM wants to bypass Apple Pay Wallet and do everything in their own app.
September 2019: Smart Navigo launches on smartphones using an Orange SIM card, and on Samsung devices.
January 2021: Le Parisien reports that Smart Navigo is coming to Apple Pay. However this turns out to be a false alarm, instead IDFM releases a new version of the ViaNavigo iPhone app with support for adding money to plastic Navigo cards with the iPhone NFC.
February 2022: Le Parisien reports Smart Navigo on Apple Pay will launch in 2023, IDFM confirms on Twitter and also announces EMV open loop support coming in 2024 in time for the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics.
French journalist Nicolas Lellouche independently confirmed the Apple Pay Navigo 2023 launch directly with IDFM and posted some details. Expect direct adding in Wallet app with Apple Pay recharge, similar to Suica, PASMO, Clipper, TAP and SmarTrip. An updated ViaNavigo app will provide extra features for commuter passes and more service options.
French reaction on Twitter was interesting and varied. People complained about the long lag getting Smart Navigo on iPhone but the equally long delay getting Smart Navigo on all Android devices, not just Samsung Galaxy, is more interesting and revealing. IDFM has spent a lot of time and expense working with Calypso Networks Association, the transaction tech used for Navigo, to develop the less secure network dependent Calypso HCE ‘cloud’ secure element approach. It flies in the face of where payment transaction technology has been going with eSE as standard hardware on all modern NFC devices.
It’s almost like Ferdinand de Lesseps digging a sea level Panama Canal when a lock-and-lake canal was the better technical choice all along but it also speaks volumes how difficult it is to launch an NFC integrated service in the wildly uneven Android hardware jungle.
As for Android Calypso HCE performance vs Apple Pay Navigo Calypso eSE performance, I suspect the network dependent HCE on Android will be problematic. It will certainly be problematic, and challenging, for non-Apple smart wearables. If there is anything the bad user reviews of Suica App tell us, it is that network connections in station areas and on trains are never reliable and Android NFC adds layer upon layer of support complexity. No network = no HCE service, it’s that simple. Apple Pay Navigo will work without a network connection, just like all transit cards on Apple Pay, and will work great on Apple Watch too.
For this reason IDFM has to focus all of their system resources on the much more complex Android 2022 launch. They could certainly launch Apple Pay Navigo sooner if they really wanted to, but it’s better to do these things one platform at a time.
Now that full 3rd party NFC access is reportedly coming with iOS 13 tag support for ISO 7816, FeliCa and MIFARE, does this mean developers get supercharged Core NFC and PassKit NFC Certificates generously handed out like condoms at a gay sex party? Probably not, the only new things in those rumors are ‘full access’ and ‘ISO 7816’, but let’s take a look at some possibilities based on the 3 NFC Forum defined NFC Modes: Card Emulation, Reader/Writer and Peer to Peer.
It’s useful to remember that A12 Bionic powered iPhone is one of the most compelling ‘Global NFC’ devices on the market, with all the important technologies in one package sold everywhere: NFC A-B-F hardware and EMV, FeliCa, MIFARE, PBOC and VAS (value added service protocol) software. Android is fragmented, especially when it comes to FeliCa support.
The big frustration for developers has been that iPhone NFC is all dressed up with no place to go. iOS 12 NFC supports Card Emulation and Reader/Writer but severely limits the Secure Element access necessary for Card Emulation with NDA covered PassKit NFC Certificates, while Core NFC is a limited Reader/Writer Mode sub-set.
Card Emulation
Apple Card UI design language is very different than iOS 12
The new Apple Card UI design used in iOS 12.2 Suica
The Apple Card UI and Wallet UI design language in iOS 12.2 and later, is so different from the rest of iOS 12 that I’m surprised nobody in the Apple tech blog space picked up on it. There are lots of useful card options and information that can be piped into Wallet cards from the card provider cloud, instead of sitting in a separate app.
This applies to card artwork as well. Static card artwork in iOS 12 doesn’t do anything and gobbles up precious screen space. The dynamic card art of Apple Card UI can be used to give important information to users while solving the wasted space problem.
Dynamic Apple Card art
Dynamic Apple Card art
iOS 12.3 Commuter Suica
Suica Commuter could like this in iOS 13 Wallet with dynamic card art
Multiple Express Cards in iOS 13 Wallet There are major Japanese eMoney prepaid cards on Android that are missing on Apple Pay: WAON, Rakuten Edy and nananco. One ‘missing on Apple Pay’ reason is that iOS 12 Apple Pay Wallet lacks a smart way to deal with multiple Express Transit and Express eMoney Cards. Wallet can hold multiple Suica cards but only one of them can be Express Transit. It’s the same for eMoney cards.
iOS 13 Wallet will complete the journey, hopefully delivering a vastly improved and unified Wallet UI that elegantly solves the multiple Express Transit/Express Card issue, and eliminates card clash. At a transit gate the user should only have to tap, at checkout the user should only have to select a payment logo on a screen or tell the sales clerk Suica, Mastercard, etc., and pay.
Multiple Express Transit Cards in iOS 12.3
Transit Card vs. Payment Card
Unified iPhone and Apple Watch Wallet I do have one more wish for the iOS 13 Wallet UI: please integrate the separate iPhone and Apple Watch Wallets into a single Wallet. It’s incredibly convenient to control all transit card recharge/reload and other options on iPhone instead of fiddling with the tiny Apple Watch screen to recharge a Suica card for example. Suica App manages separate Suica cards on iPhone and Apple Watch incredibly well in one place.
Easy Card Emulation I am less sure how Apple plans to make card emulation easier for developers:
New functions in PassKit that do more
Less stringent and easier to obtain PassKit NFC Certificates
A combination of the two or
Something new altogether
Whatever the approach, I hope it keeps everything secure while making it easy for developers to add all kinds of non-EMV cards to Wallet, the major categories include…
Transit Cards: Transit cards have been tricky because up to now each one has been a kind of custom in-house job by Apple in cooperation with the transit company. HOP launched May 21 and Ventra will arrive this summer.Clipper has been rumored for Apple Pay inclusion for some time. Hong Kong Octopus (FeliCa) and Los Angeles area TAP (EMV only?) should arrive shortly after the iOS 13 launch in September. It would be great if iOS 13 PassKit makes it easy to add all kinds of native transit cards like Taiwan EasyCARD and Melbourne Myki (both MIFARE) and more (like Calypso for example) to the mix, with Apple having to do less for a real transit card coming out party. Unfortunately I don’t see Singapore’s EZ-Link card ever joining the party unless iOS 13 PassKit makes it very easy to support customized payment technology like the Singapore only CEPAS.
Prepaid Reward Cards: There are lots of these everywhere. In Japan we have: Edy, nanaco, WAON (all FeliCa), Dotour (MIFARE), Ueshima (Mag strip) and Starbucks (FeliCa and Mag strip). Most of these have apps that let users attach credit cards to the backend for online recharge. None of them are on Apple Pay but need to be, urgently, to combat manufactured QR code mania stealth marketing. The challenge for Apple here is the same as transit cards: make it easy for developers to do more, with open API access and easy to obtain PassKit NFC Certificates. I suspect one hold up has been that every single one of these prepaid reward cards wants to have an Express Card option to bypass authentication at the reader. iOS 12 Wallet only supports a single Express card at a time. Hopefully iOS 13 Wallet solves the problem.
Regular Reward Cards: There are tons of these everywhere, mostly mag strip. My real wallet has JRE POINT, WAON POINT, Tomod’s, plus a crazy collection of stamp/point cards. How nice it would be if it was super easy for developers to port these to Wallet with NFC capability.
ID Cards: This is where ISO 7816 tag support fits in. Contactless Student ID cards in iOS 12 were a MIFARE only custom in-house job, transit cards without transit, by Apple in cooperation with Blackboard. Hopefully Apple will greatly extend ID card support in all NFC flavors for many companies and institutions, for all manner of ‘company only’ Wallet ID cards.
VAS: Apple Value Added Service protocol has been around a few years but uptake has been slow, almost as slow as VAS works on NFC readers and POS systems. This is more of an performance issue on the POS side than PassKit, nevertheless anything Apple can do to help increase VAS performance would be welcome. So would VAS working with Express Transit.
Reader/Writer
Android has a huge advantage over iOS because Android apps have the NFC access to do what they want. From RFID Insider:
Below are all the abilities/formats available for writing to a tag:
Business Card Link/URL Wi-Fi Bluetooth Email Telephone Number Geo Location Launch an Application Plain Text SMS
A fully functional Core NFC could do all this, but the important question is how would Apple want to do all this. NFC tags are great technology but they remain deeply geeky for the majority of users. The key is making NFC tags as friendly, easy and secure to use as Apple Pay. This is exactly what Apple plans to do.
Apple announced support for NFC stickers/tags that trigger Apple Pay for payment without having an app installed. Imagine tapping your phone on a scooter or a parking-meter and paying for it without signing up or downloading an app first. #ApplePayhttps://t.co/owgOsH3N7Lpic.twitter.com/jpxUf7H6v6
At the TRANSACT 2019 conference Jennifer Bailey announced NFC tag Apple Pay. NFC tag Apple Pay works with or without apps. All the user does is tap a NFC tag and Apple Pay takes care of the rest as shown in the demo video using a SmartPlate NFC tag.
The easiest way to think of it is that instead of tapping a dedicated NFC reader to pay with Apple Pay, NFC tag Apple Pay turns your iPhone into the reader. An NFC tag and iPhone is all that you need to Apple Pay at a store.
What does this sound like to you? Yep, this is enhanced Core NFC Read/Write for NFC tags that does exactly what QR Codes do. NFC tag Apple Pay is aimed right at the ‘but the store doesn’t need an expensive NFC reader to use QR’ sweet spot that QR Codes have occupied up to now. NFC tag Apple Pay levels the play field, neatly eliminating the QR advantage while offering security that QR Codes cannot match.
However don’t assume that the QR players are chained to QR Codes, it’s an inexpensive and convenient technology for building payment system app services, nothing more, not particularly sacred. Enhanced Core NFC and NFC tag Apple Pay works in an app and this offers Japanese QR Code payment systems such as Line, PayPay, etc., a way to incorporate Apple Pay NFC support in their app, if they choose to do so.
A12 Bionic iPhone XR/XS are the only devices that support background NCF tag reading and the native ability to read tags without an app. The big question in my mind is how Apple plans to implement enhanced Core NFC and NFC tag Apple Pay on older devices
Peer to Peer
iOS 12 does not support NFC Peer to Peer. I don’t see that changing in iOS 13 if it can’t be part of a new Apple Pay or related service. AirDrop already works well across devices that do not have NFC capability. That’s probably enough real world peer to peer for most people.
Summary
The Apple Pay theme for WWDC18 was ‘move Passes into Wallet, get rid of the QR Codes and replace them NFC.’ The new Apple Card UI improvements in Wallet and NFC tag support suggest the Apple Pay theme for WWDC19 will be: ‘move card functionality out of apps and into Wallet cards with new iOS 13 PASSKit controls, or get rid of apps altogether and replace them will all kinds of NFC enabled cards and NFC tags.’
It certainly makes sense. Apple Pay is NFC for the majority of iPhone users, the NFC thing that people use. Apple devoting iOS resources into making card emulation easier and better for 3rd party developers to add all kinds of cards to Wallet, and migrate functions out of separate apps to the Wallet card itself, will give the most bang for the development buck. NFC tag Apple Pay will finally bring NFC tags into the mainstream while eliminating the remaining advantages of QR Codes. It’s going to be a very interesting WWDC for all things Apple Pay.
The most interesting detail is the device eligibility: iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus and later, Apple Watch Series 1 and later but Express Mode isn’t available on iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus. NFC-A/B, definitely not FeliCa but MIFARE. Blackboard’s IC card format is both FeliCa and MIFARE but the eligible device list makes it clear that student ID cards are PassKit NFC Certificate powered MIFARE Card Emulation.
The rest of the support doc details confirm the cards are stored value (SV) with Express Mode and students can recharge them with Apple Pay, a credit/debit card in the eAccounts app or cash at the “school’s self-service machines”. In other words it’s just like Suica App and Apple Pay Suica for door locks instead of transit.
UPDATE The Blackboard IC card format uses both FeliCa and MIFARE but Blackboard has been migrating IC cards to MIFARE. Apple has not publicly announced MIFARE support, the only place to find out for this kind of thing is WWDC, but it is the only technology compatible with Blackboard IC card formats that could power the express card features of iOS 12 student ID cards across all eligible devices.
A12 Bionic powers Express Cards with power reserve on iPhone XS/XR that operate independently of iOS, previous Express Cards require iOS to be up and running to operate
Apple revealed details of NFC improvements coming to iOS 12 and watchOS 5. Contactless Student ID Cards for Wallet were announced at the WWDC18 Keynote on June 4. Apple clearly wants to promote NFC Passes in Wallet over clunky QR Codes and showed a video of NFC Passes in action on Apple Watch at the Wembley Stadium contactless NFC ticket gate. In the same Apple Pay session Apple software engineers explained how to strip out QR Code references in Wallet Passes and replace them NFC. NFC Passes were previously shown at WWDC16 but uptake has been slow and Apple seems eager to push them more aggressively with iOS 12.
Contactless passes Wallet supports the value added service (VAS) protocol for transmitting data from supported passes to compatible NFC terminals. The VAS protocol can be implemented on contactless terminals and uses NFC to communicate with supported Apple devices. The VAS protocol works over a short distance and can be used to present contactless passes independently or as part of an Apple Pay transaction.
It’s also clear that Apple wants to promote contactless passes on Apple Watch over iPhone: NFC passes were unveiled during the watchOS segment and are gorgeously displayed exclusively on the watchOS 5 page. Assa Abloy and Blackboard are working with Apple to make those happen. You might remember Assa Abloy from The Information rumor piece about door locks and ID Passes coming to Wallet but the actual ID card format and associated backend services are all Blackboard.
Contactless Student ID cards are Stored Value (SV)
Because they are SV cards, they can be recharged
Since they will reside in Apple Pay Wallet this means contactless student ID cards can be ‘recharged’ with an Apple Pay credit card instead of running to the nearest ‘refill/recharge’ station. Anytime, Anywhere Recharge.
Sound familiar? It’s just like Apple Pay Suica that you can recharge on the go and use for JR East Suica coin lockers. The only real difference is that Student ID Cards cannot be used for transit. At least not yet. The Apple Pay Developer page says, “discover how to create contactless passes for rewards cards, gift cards, tickets, and more.” Contactless passes for reward cards eh? Sounds like that JRE POINT card in Apple Pay Wallet will be possible after all.
An interesting aspect of implementing NFC Passes in Wallet is the “NFC Certificate” requirement that are issued by Apple to the developer and strictly controlled for security purposes. PassKit NFC Certificates were previously available, covered by NDA and extremely limited. Since door locks and ID passes are involved, the NDA is still central to the application process. However, if Apple is opening up NFC access to more developers wider NFC Certificate distribution could be the ticket for developers to gain NFC access that was not possible up to now. At least for mere mortals.
It will be fascinating to see what developers do with wider NFC Certificate distribution and what NFC passes/reward cards, and hopefully much more, that come out of it with iOS 12 and watchOS 5.
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