Will we soon be able to pay with our iPhone without using Apple Pay?
Accused of restricting competition in contactless payment systems on its phones, Apple is ready to accept competing services in the EU, the European Commission announced this Friday, January 19, which will evaluate this proposal.
“
To allay the Commission's competition concerns
,” the company proposed offering third-party providers access on its iPhones to the NFC functionality that enables communication between devices and payment terminals in stores , explained the European executive, in a press release.
Ten-year commitment
This commitment would be valid for ten years throughout the European Economic Area (EEA, i.e. the 27 EU countries plus Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein).
It would affect all users of the iOS operating system with an Apple ID in these countries.
The European Commission, the EU's competition watchdog, announced that it was inviting all interested parties to submit their comments on the commitments offered by Apple within one month.
In May 2022, the European executive accused Apple of blocking competition in contactless payment systems on its phones.
Brussels opened an investigation in June 2020 after complaints from European banks.
The solution proposed by the Cupertino group is to allow systems competing with its in-house Apple Pay system to access the NFC functionality for free “
thanks to a set of application programming interfaces (API)
”, detailed the Commission.
“
Apple would create the necessary APIs to allow equivalent access to NFC components
” with technology to “
securely store payment credentials
,” she stressed.
Closed ecosystem
Apple iPhones run exclusively on the iOS operating system developed by the Apple brand.
They form a “
closed ecosystem
” of which the company controls all parameters.
Apple Pay is currently the only mobile wallet solution working on Apple devices, the group having never allowed other application developers to access it.
“
We have proposed commitments to provide third-party developers in the European Economic Area with an option that will allow their users to make NFC contactless payments (...) separately from Apple Pay and Apple Wallet
,” he said. confirmed the group contacted by AFP, while emphasizing that its own Apple Pay application would always remain “
a widely available option
”.
Apple and five other digital giants - Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Meta (Facebook), Microsoft as well as the Chinese ByteDance, owner of TikTok - will be subject from the beginning of March to the new digital markets regulation (DMA) which introduces stricter rules to stem anti-competitive practices in the EU.