Apple doesn’t participate in a lot of outside developer conferences; at least, not as a presenter. So it’s unsurprising that a small presentation from Apple at the Transact conference (which focuses on the electronic transactions industry) flew under the radar.
But what Apple announced there may change the way we pay for stuff. It could make Apple Pay and your iPhone a much more common way to pay for everything from vending machines to parking meters—essentially anything where you don’t visit a register with a point-of-sale system.
Apple Pay Everywhere
One of the rumored features of iOS 13 is a big expansion of NFC tools for developers, expanding the Core NFC framework’s ability to read NFC tags of various formats. Currently, an iPhone can only read an NFC tag (those little “tap your phone here to do something” areas) if it contains data in the NFC Data Exchange Format (NDEF). This will be expanded to allow devs to read ISO7816, FeliCa, or MiFare formats, too. Or so the rumor goes. That means developers can write apps that make your iPhone work with way more NFC tags in way more places. But that’s just the beginning.
