Apple Pay Octopus and the iOS 12.1.3 Release Window

UPDATE: Apple Pay Octopus is coming with iOS 13

Note: For simplicity and convenience I have migrated and merged older Octopus related posts here. All new Octopus related developments will be posted separately.

JR East posted a special maintenance schedule this month for Mobile Suica on 1/15, 1/22 and 1/28. The work appears concentrated on the Suica Recharge backend which hopefully points to improved Apple Pay Suica Recharge performance.

I think it also points to something else: a iOS 12.1.3 release with Apple Pay Octopus/Hong Kong transit directions for Apple Maps service around January 29 Cupertino time, early am January 30 in Hong Kong. The timing fits with a full beta test cycle wrap up but more importantly it fits as a kickoff for the Chinese New Year vacation period, good news for an important market to Tim Cook who desperately needs some good news right now.

Go for it Tim! It will undoubtedly help Apple sell more global FeliCa iPhones because Octopus on Apple Pay is a great marketing angle for the iPhone XR/XS models with Express Card power reserve and bulletproofed FeliCa performance. I have yet to experience a single Apple Pay Suica gate error from my iPhone XS with daily use since the launch date.

UPDATE
It occurred to me after posting the above that Apple has introduced transit cards and the technology behind them with larger point releases: iOS 10.1 for Suica (FeliCa) and iOS 11.3 for Beijing and Shanghai Transit cards (Apple flavored PBOC 2.0 ED/EP). In this scenario iOS 12.2 is the logical starting point for Octopus on Apple Pay. However, Octopus is FeliCa which has been part of Apple Pay for over 2 years, Apple has ample engineering and testing experience with the technology to add Octopus with a smaller point release, or none at all which was the case with contactless student ID cards.

UPDATE 2
The original source reports pointed to an end of January rollout, now that iOS 12.1.3 is released we will see how it plays out between now and iOS 12.2. Considering the Apple Pay Suica launch meltdown on iOS 10.1 update day, Apple would be wise to launch on a quiet network day as Apple Pay Octopus day 1 user additions will far outstrip any regular credit card Apple Pay rollout, the use profile for prepaid transit cards is very different.

UPDATE 3
It looks like we’ll have to wait a while longer for Octopus on Apple Pay.

iOS 12.1.2 Apple Pay Suica Performance Issues

No sooner than Apple issued the iOS 12.1.2 update that JR East pushed out a Suica system notice in their iOS Suica App: When Suica Balance Fails to Update. I guess this really means that Apple still hasn’t fixed iOS 12 Apple Pay Suica performance issues for everybody. My experience with iOS 12.1.2 on iPhone XS has been good so far but it takes time to find out what Suica performance on any iOS release really is. Whatever the case may be, fixing dead Suica notifications and a lost Suica Balance is very simple.

Put Suica in Service Mode and let your device sit for 10~15 seconds, then quit Apple Pay or simply put the screen to sleep. A Suica Notification will then appear with the updated Suica balance. Let’s hope that Apple’s New Year resolution list includes quickly fixing Apple Pay Suica performance issues.


iOS 12.1.1 Suica Express Transit Performance

Apple has never issued an iOS update that specifically mentions Suica or Express Transit Card performance, so each update becomes a guessing game of what’s fixed and what’s not. iOS 12.1.1 was released December 6 in Japan and there has been very little mention of Suica performance on Twitter. Not necessarily a good thing, if performance has changed dramatically, good or bad, people tweet about it.

I reached out to a few trusty Revision B iPhone X Suica user sources. They report no change from the buggy Suica performance they’ve experienced since upgrading to iOS 12. A few iPhone 8 users have also complained about buggy Suica performance. My experience with Suica Express Transit on iPhone XS continues to be excellent though Apple Pay Suica recharge performance is poor when recharging from a Suica notification short cut.

Here’s the iOS 12.1.1 performance score as I see it:

  • Suica Express Transit performance on pre A12 Bionic iPhone: B-
    • Occasional error flicker at transit gates
    • Unresponsive Apple Pay Suica recharge, 50% failure rate when recharging via Suica notifications
  • Suica Express Transit performance on A12 Bionic iPhone: A-
    • Unresponsive Apple Pay Suica recharge, 50% failure rate when recharging via Suica notifications

As pointed out in earlier posts Suica Express Card with power reserve on A12 Bionic is a significant departure from previous devices both in operation and performance. Also the iOS 12 Suica Express Card error flicker issue is a iOS 12 software issue that is completely different from the iPhone X Suica NFC hardware problem.

The quick summary is that Suica Express Card performance has not improved from iOS 12.1. We’ll have to wait until iOS 12.1.2 and try again.

Contactless Payment Turf Wars: Why Oyster is missing from mobile

  1. Contactless Payment Turf Wars: Transit Platforms
  2. Contactless Payment Turf Wars: PiTaPa Pitfalls
  3. >Contactless Payment Turf Wars: Why Oyster is missing from mobile
  4. Contactless Payment Turf Wars: Tapping the potential of TAP
  5. Contactless Payment Turf Wars: Apple Card and the Prepaid Innovation of Apple Pay Suica
  6. Contactless Payment Turf Wars: EMV closed loop transit dumb cards

EMV Open Loop
It is very strange that the TfL Oyster card, which completely transformed London area transit still isn’t hosted natively on Apple Pay or Google Pay. Other MIFARE based cards are hosted on both digital wallet platforms and TfL has an Oyster app for account management and online recharge (top-ups). From a technical standpoint there doesn’t seem to be any particular problem preventing them. Perhaps it is a political thing.

TfL decided in 2011 to put their resources into the emerging EMV contactless standard. The reason was simple:

The current Oyster system, though very popular, is expensive and complex to administer. Contactless bank cards use existing technology, responsibility for issuing cards would lie with the banks rather than TfL, and the operating costs should be lower.

That is politician think, not business think: everything is a budget problem, not a business opportunity that needs investment, reduce costs by letting someone else pick up the tab but let them take their cut first. I wonder if TfL publishes how much they pay out in transaction processing fees to banks and Cubic? Perhaps not. Meanwhile budget pressures are not letting up as Londonist notes:

In 2017 there was a push to nudge people away from their Oyster cards and towards contactless. One announcement rang out all over London’s tube stations: Why not use your contactless bank card today? Never top up again, and it’s the same fare as Oyster.

The die was cast in 2014 and probably won’t change. Instead of putting resources into hosting Oyster on Apple Pay or Google Pay, TfL and Cubic already have a mobile solution which is ‘open loop’ ticketing with EMV contactless bank cards. Open loop does not address the finer issues of different fare schedules (children, seniors, etc.), commuter passes, season tickets, nationwide transit interoperability, regional promotion, nor does it offer the business advantages of a transit payment platform, Express Cards with power reserve or any kind of future vision. That’s the end of the open loop story because EMV contactless is a very dumb smart card.

It’s a shame really because TfL loves to say they generate the most transactions in all of Europe. That’s a value capture gold mine to build an empire, budget problems solved. Unfortunately TfL gives that gold mine away to the banking industry and Cubic.

You can see the same thinking with Oyster’s Australian cousin, the Opal card system, built and managed by Cubic, just like Oyster. Opal is also going the ‘open loop’ route instead of transit cards on mobile.

Open Loop QR

Hong Kong’s Octopus (FeliCa) and Singapore’s EZ-Link (Ex-FeliCa now CEPAS) are going open loop but in different ways. EZ-Link has been testing EMV contactless for over 2 years now, users report a less than smooth experience. Kaohsiung Rapid Transit in Taiwan which uses MIFARE based iPASS and EasyCard is also considering EMV contactless open loop while the recently opened Taoyuan Airport MRT offers QR Codes and a cute YouTube video.

Hong Kong going the QR Code route shows how badly AliPay wants in on Hong Kong transit, and MTR Corporation in on China transit, bad enough that Hong Kong will sacrifice a great transit payment platform for AliPay, another gold mine giveaway. Judging by the AliPay branding and retrofitted QR Code readers on Hangzhou Metro gates in the pictures above, what AliPay wants, AliPay gets, but the fast FeliCa based Octopus smart card stands in the way. Instead of improving Octopus or extending mobile Smart Octopus, it looks like Hong Kong will invest in very slow and very dumb QR. The Hong Kong Economic Journal had this to say about the development:

MTR has set its sights on a major revamp of its fare collection system, accepting new electronic payments methods rather than just single journey tickets and Octopus Cards. From the passengers’ perspective, it means there will be no need to have an Octopus card on hand for a journey on local trains, if MTR’s new fare collection system supports all the mainstream contactless payment methods such as Visa payWave and MasterCard PayPass, or mobile payment means like Apple Pay, Samsung Pay and Google Pay.

Japan in the middle
TfL/Oyster and Transport for NSW/Opal, Octopus, EZ-Link are government held transit authorities, not private independent companies. Publicly run transit authorities are subject to politics and special interests like any government agency, this sometimes leads to poor decisions and short-term thinking.

Japan was fortunate that major transit players like JR East, are private companies with strong technology partners, like Sony and NTT Docomo. Out of this fortunate set of circumstances Suica was created and finally reached  the market in 2001 (a fascinating engineering story). Suica became the Japan IC Transit card template which evolved into the ubiquitous Japan Transit IC Mutual Use Association project for transit and e-money use. Mobile Suica was introduced in 2006 by NTT Docomo and now resides on the Apple Pay and Google Pay platforms.

The ubiquity and scale of interoperable transit IC cards sets Japan apart from all other countries. China copied the Japanese model for China T-Union but the cards cannot be used as e-money and have been upstaged by AliPay and WeChat Pay which, surprise, can be used for e-money and transit.

Japan occupies a very unusual middle ground between EMV contactless from the West and QR Codes from China, neither of which play well together. The scale of Suica provides the breathing space for Japan to pick and chose what works best for, and enhances their transit payment platform. The result is an incredibly rich and varied contactless payments market anchored around Suica and similar FeliCa prepaid cards.

Future trends
For every marketing report that predicts QR Code payments growing into a 70 billion USD sized market by 2023, someone else calls it nonsense because Suica is becoming the card for everything. In many ways Suica already is. MITI said it is investigating using QR Codes for small rural transit systems that cannot afford IC card systems. This loops back to TfL complaint that IC cards are expensive to issue and manage.

Low-cost QR Codes certainly make sense for lightly used rural transit operations but they have a fatal weakness: they don’t have plastic card versions that work anywhere and seniors prefer the simplicity of plastic, QR Codes require a high cost network connected smart device, an app and are strictly one way read with no offline processing.

JR East and Sony have announced that they will solve cost problems for rural transit and much more in early 2021 with Super Suica.


Update: Open Loop QR Code Security Risks
One issue that was in the back of my mind while writing this post was the privacy and security implications of letting AliPay inside with direct transactions on transit gates. Japanese customers are very sensitive about where and how transaction records are held and used but I have yet to see any security discussion in connection with Hong Kong MTR opening up transit gates to AliPay and WeChat Pay. QR Code transactions are very different from offline FeliCa Octopus transactions. Where and how does the QR Code transaction data from Hong Kong MTR transit gates get stored, does the Chinese government has access to it to gather intelligence from transaction and location records?

If there is one thing we do know about Chinese companies is that they do what they want when nobody is looking. Witness China Telecom spoofing the BGP protocol to poison internet routes and suck up massive amounts of American and Canadian internet traffic for intelligence analysis. If I was living in Hong Kong I would be concerned about the privacy implications of MTR going open loop with QR codes.

UPDATE November 2020
Digital Ventra and Digital Opal from Mastercard and Cubic are the model for Oyster on digital wallet platforms

iOS 12 Apple Pay Wallet pulled a MIFARE and nobody noticed

The Apple Wallet Ponta card launch at LAWSON presents another dilemma: just what exactly is Apple using for iOS 12/watchOS 5 Apple Wallet Passes and Student ID cards? Student ID cards and Apple Wallet Ponta have the same device eligibility specs: iOS 12/watch OS 5 running on iPhone 6 and later/Apple Watch Series 1 and later. Let’s take a look.

You might assume that Apple Wallet Ponta is FeliCa because it’s only in Japan but the eligible device list tells a different story. You might also assume that everything in Japan is FeliCa but this is also not the case. Doutor Coffee shops sell a handy little Doutor pre-paid card that is MIFARE and it works flawlessly side by side with FeliCa flavored Apple Pay Suica on the same NFC reader.

Altogether we have an interesting spec list for Student ID.

The only technology that fits this profile along with Express Cards for Student ID cards is MIFARE. Only Apple could pull this kind of ‘under the hood thing’ off in iOS 12 without anybody suspecting and it neatly puts all the major NFC technology pieces on Apple Pay: EMV, FeliCa, MIFARE and PBOC China Transit.

Blackboard supplies the technology and backend services for Student ID cards on iOS 12. I contacted Blackboard PR to confirm if the card technology was FeliCa or MIFARE but did not receive an answer. However I did run across an interesting Blackboard press release from 2015 Blackboard and NXP Semiconductors Collaborate to Strengthen Campus Card Technology:

Blackboards’ push to adopt NFC in addition to their existing MIFARE-based solutions, back in 2012 showed incredible insight into the potential of this technology. The security, convenience and flexibility that NXPs NFC and MIFARE solutions bring truly reflect the student lifestyle. Now access to campus services can be simply enabled via a smart watch or smart phone.

Based on this and the fact it came 2 years after a FeliCa demo of Blackboard Student ID cards with a rumored migration from FeliCa to MIFARE, plus the eligible device specs, the only conclusion is that Student ID cards on iOS 12 are MIFARE which is NFC-A/B (technically NFC-A).

Apple Wallet Ponta cards on iOS 12 are VAS protocol contactless passes outlined at WWDC18 , WWDC16, and in the Contactless Passes section of the iOS Security Guide:

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.

This is also NFC-A. Contactless passes have been around for a while on iOS but adoption has been slow. With iOS 12 PASSKit, Apple is encouraging developers to migrate from QR Codes to NFC contactless passes and hopefully relaxes the NFC Certificate requirement bar a little. Part of the reason for the slow uptake is poor NFC reader support. LAWSON has a new POS system built around Panasonic JT-R600CR readers which are Apple Pay savvy and Apple Wallet Ponta cards only work correctly when you tell the LAWSON cashier to use “Apple Pay”.

UPDATE
Apple announced support for Portland’s HOP Fastpass transit card which is MIFARE