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Is Android coming up with an equivalent of Apple Pay, Samsung, Sony etc?
Bill Clinton
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Just wondering..
There's a NFC chip in the Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini so it must be possible, I guess it would be limited to Android handhelds with NFC.
There's a NFC chip in the Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini so it must be possible, I guess it would be limited to Android handhelds with NFC.
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https://www.android.com/pay/
Now if it will be available outside the US is a totally different question (as Google did have Google Wallet which offered the same thing but was only available in America IIRC).
Google Wallet's biggest problem was Google wanted to capture the information about what you had bought, where, and which retailer - to go into their big database.
If Android Pay doesn't do this then more retailers will be interested. (Apple Pay doesn't capture any of your data).
In the USA it's probably a tiny bit less of a concern as the Android device use there is lower than in other areas of the world.
So, Google would be smart to launch this in the UK, primarily because the UK is a huge smartphone market and it has lots of services already that will be useful with Android Pay (e.g. London Underground).
I'm not so sure, any form of Android Pay isn't going to work on the lesser Chinese brands, or the cheap end of the market like Alcatel, most Huawei, ZTE, or even lower end Motorola, Sony, HTC or Samsung.
When you look at the higher end smartphone market I doubt it's all the much bigger than iPhone.
Can you imaging the PR furore when 70%-80% of Android phone owners are excluded, including many current phones..
It probably is around say 25% of Android users that have a phone that supports NFC, but when you think Android has a 78% share of the market that is still quite a lot of phones that so support it (still around 20% of all the smartphone market share).
Whereas it's just the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus that support NFC so I presume that would be less than 10% of the smartphone market share?
More then 400 million android phones shipped with nfc last year so it is in plenty of cheap phones also.
It's still on their website.
http://ee.co.uk/ee-and-me/travel-shopping/cash-on-tap
The problem is that it needed the right, EE supplied, handset and was a bit tricky to set up and get going. As such the take up must have been poor, and the lack of promotion suggests EE will quietly let it disappear in the future - especially once Google gets in on the act properly, so existing users can be migrated to another Android-based system.