Hi! What alternatives are there to Google Wallet? I am only looking for a secure app that allows me to pay with my phone instead of a card, I do not really care about the rest of functionality
Use your card.
Works the same way as your phone.
However, if you are looking to store loyalty cards and stuff then catima is very useful.
You’re not going to find something outside of official large companies. The reason they work at all is because the money never goes through your account during that transaction, but between the bank and Google/Apple/whoever. It’s all handwaving and trust relationships. A typical tap goes through (basically) these steps.
- Tap
- The phone requests a unique one-time token from Google wallet, which is an intent to pay, signalling that the payment will be authorized
- The POS system takes the token through the tap, sends it to their banking sofware
- The banking system then asks Google/Apple/whoever “Hey is this token legit”. They then validate it
- The money transfers between Google -> Bank. (Google will probably front the actual deployment of money from your bank -> Google -> Their bank)
This is why it’s the most secure, because nowhere in that process can anyone intercept anything about you, all they would get is a one-time use token, which is only good from that specific POS system. Even the POS doesn’t really get much about you except for what Google/Apple responds with.
It’s because of this behind-the-scenes transaction that makes it almost impossible to have an open source version. You would need to convince all of the existing banking infrastructure (who remember still use
csv files“wires”) to move money around in batches at night to not only implement Google, Apple, and Samsung, but also the open source app that is totally secure and legit, you can trust us.Not only that, but you immediately open yourself up to issues with money too. Accepting money is easy, sending money out is just 3 1/2 headaches. Not only do you have the risk, you have security and compliance, you have agencies, you have auditing, FINRA, the SEC can get involved, and that’s only in America. If you want to go international? Hoo boy, just take all of that neasea and personal liability and turn it up to 1000 because now you have to think about every country and their laws.
So, probably more than you wanted to know, but that’s why you’re not going to find one.
Source - worked FinTech for about 7 years, learned way too much about finance back then
Cryptocurrency was supposed to solve this problem; instead we ended up with endless grifting and memecoins designed to leave ignorant rubes holding the bag.
Lol “supposed to”
Tell me another joke
Eh, cryptocurrency was never supposed to solve any problem, it was a proof of concept that pariah states realized could enable them to avoid US sanctions. The “it’s more secure than banks” talking points were conceived after the fact by the grifters.
I think that’s viewing it from the current lens. At the time, the big promise was that you could pay for things without involving all of those pesky big companies. Naive, yes, but the idea of a secure financial transaction is similar in nature to the current tap/wallet methods. But yes, it was commandeered by crooks almost immediately.
No, this was obvious a decade or more ago and it’s still obvious today. I believe it followed the rule that “if there is something only male libertarians like, it’s not good”.
The story of Bitcoin is the same story as PayPal and Peter thiel and the first X, except the man-children are less famous.
Yeah I’ll concede that Satoshi almost certainly had unrealized but aspirational goals for the tech, but speaking personally as far back as I can remember, crypto’s primary function was a speculative asset.
My earliest knowledge was 2011, can confirm
Exactly, modern banking is a permissionned network and its security is mainly based on access restriction.
Why invite any middleman into your transactions to spy on you at all? Tapping a credit card is the easiest thing to do.
Strapping a card to the back of your phone is really the easiest alternative.
Where I am, banks provide small NFC stickers for this purpose.
I know this won’t resonate with people but gonna plant the seed anyway:
CASH MONEY, BABY
the OG privacy means of payment.
Wondering what Wero brings?
First - I use cash in the absolute majority of situations. Control and privacy are absolutely worth it. Second - don’t banks usually have their own payment system anyway? At least mine doesn’t have functionality tied to Google services (to acommodate Chinaphones that come without such, but accidentally acommodating Graphene, Lineage and others as well).
I had an objection to google pay for a while, and discovered Barclaycard (credit card in the uk) use an app which would act as a replacement for google pay. Worked perfectly. Of course then I found out how terrible barclays bank is for the environment, so I tap my co-op credit card now. Interestingly, google pay takes nothing when you use them to buy stuff, Applepay grab 0.25% as a transaction fee. Makes them billions per year, and the cost is shared by all of us.
Samsung Pay Apple Pay
If there are others I don’t know about them. I use Google Wallet.
I don’t have an iPhone. Samsung Wallet only allows to add everything but payment cards
Kinda weird there’s not an open source alternative
They’d need to collaborate with a multitude of financial institutions in whichever jurisdictions they’d want to operate in. That’s just a level of resources most FOSS projects don’t have. Plus, I can’t imagine banks would be big proponents of open-source; where’s the money in that?
Also I can’t think of a FOSS project with the time or money to comply with US/EU financial laws.
You can’t just buy into API access for NFC payments. You got to pay somebody big bucks to let you on their network.
I understand that. I think its strange that we collectively consented to that.
I think it wasn’t really consented to as much as it was built around us.
Tap to pay was created to make small transactions more palatable to the public. The big players dreamed it up financed it and put it out there. The cost to do so was likely staggering as it required a change to how all card processing machines worked.
If you wanted to do this as a grassroots movement, you’d need to provide hardware to read the cards/devices. You’re simply no way that any of the current major financial players is going to accept anyone on to their network without paying big bucks.
Samsung Galaxy watch 3 actually did something that worked somewhat amazingly that FOSS could follow, They post the NFC radio on and off to match the contents of a credit card stripe. You could actually walk up to an old machine hold your watch up for the card was swiped, and hit pay and your watch would trigger the card reader to think it read a card. I blew some poor cashiers mind at the local Ace hardware. Oh no, we don’t take tap to… BEEP, oh. I. I never seen it …
Not really, it’s not feasible for open source developers to get the kind of access required from payment providers to make it work.
You could set up some kind of NFC reader or dummy phone at home and then essentially wire its communication through the internet to your other phone and then have it Read a credit card that you leave on the reader at home. Although this is a little sketch.
Garmin pay. It does require a Garmin watch though.
@oakward I am interested too! I’m afraid there aren’t many options without relying on big tech
