I’m trying to move away from Google and other big tech corporations as much as I can without sacrificing practicality but it seems like the only way to make contactless payments is with stock android on a Google approved device.
Is there any alternative out there that would allow me to make contactless payments without these conditions met? (For example, if I put grapheneos on my phone)
Considering it’s a heavily regulated industry, I think what you’re asking for is impossible.
I don’t think so. These are heavily regulated and that’s why Google Pay/Apple Pay is still not available in all countries after so many years.
So unless your bank allows that, which I doubt they’ll, Google Pay is probably the only way to do contactless payment the traditional way.
Unless your country/city has a widely accepted third party payment system that doesn’t go through the bank, like a digital wallet that you’ll have to top up its credit, then maybe.
I’m incline to say that there’s no way. I order to have secure payments you have to secure each and every step of the process. Without a big corporation under those steps no one in his right mind will gamble with payments
Everything in the banking / point of sale space requires certification, thus there are few solutions that enter the space as it is a slow costly process that involves payment processors and banks.
- use the original cards
- Apple Pay
- Google Pay
- Samsung pay
- a few others
- various NFC cloning tools that will raise eyebrows at the checkout (flipper zero)
man, I wish. my bank’s app used to have its own built-in contactless payment option (and it would even appear in Android’s “default apps” section as a payment handler!) but then they moved to Google Pay “due to a popular demand” :/
I personally feel this should be the way. But knowing how bank do their security I don’t have faith in their software engineering as well. It’s 2023 and in Canada most bank ATM still only have 4 digit pin and the online banking login protection are like lagging 10+ years behind.
There is Samsung Pay, Garmin Pay, Fitbit Pay, but all are big cooperations too and I think some only work on wearables. Another alternative are payment rings with a card in them.
There are other payment solutions. I have never used them and do not know how widely they are accepted. Maybe Paypal, Venmo, and Square have POS solutions. I do not think they are NFC. Maybe QR-code based? This is from memory. Maybe someone else knows more.
But yes beyond the ones people talked about, crypto, and the three I mentioned I am not sure there are any others in the US.
Would you consider samsung wallet big tech?
They are much smaller than google (user base wise)
I am not entirely sure it can be installed on non Samsung phones and non stock roms
Samsung is about the same size as Alphabet
Samsung, chaebol, is f-king huge.
Personally I just put my bank card inside my phone cover. Maybe not as fancy as NFC payment, but does the job.
I would do that but I don’t get on with phone covers and cases
Not that i am aware of. Our financial system is loaded with proprietary software. The only way i have found to fix it is to opt out as much as possible and use cryptocurrency which is what i have done
I love the idea of crypto as an actual currency but I think that’s probably never going to be widely accepted and stable
I suspect it will. We in the western world (US, Canada, UK, EU, etc) are used to very stable fiat currencies. Ask a person from Argentina, Turkey, etc if they would rather have their national currency or crypto and i bet a lot of them would take the crypto. A 10% fluctuation to them is a blessing to them because if they hold their currency they may drop 100% a year because of inflation.
I mean that’s great if those countries can benefit from it in that way, that’d be awesome to see
Not sure how that’s going to come to Western countries though especially with how resistant to positive change our society seems to be
Also not sure our government would ever do anything that benefits the people and hurts the banks
Edit: also they can just use other currencies that are more stable than their own anyway
Just use a wallet. How is this even a question?
How is this even a response? Oh, just do what you deem appropriate and nothing else? Get outta here with that nonsense.
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Banks in the US often do not provide contactless cards. Contactless payments are only starting to gain some traction since the pandemic… beforehand it was pretty rare, at least on the east coast (I get the sense that other regions of the country were better about this). It is actually madness, though.
Big banks have been contactless is mostly the smaller banks. The bigger reason is for ease of access or reduced wallet size. If you have multiple credit cards or store cards you don’t have to carry them all around with you…
This has not been my experience at all. I’ve had tap for over a decade in Canada, and large banks in the US here did not give me contactless cards a few year ago. In the past couple of years they seem to be rolling out more of them, but people always looked at me like I was a lunatic whenever I tried to tap my Canadian card to pay for something.
Well you kept apologizing for it. We Americans aren’t accustomed to that.
The Indian UPI System is a pretty great for this. I wish more countries adopted it/built something similar instead of relying on corporations.
Oh damn that’s awesome go India.
You would hope tech like that would eventually propogate to the rest of the world but doesn’t seem like anyone with money really cares about the wants and needs of consumers (and existing contactless systems already make it easier than ever for people to fork over their cash) so it probably won’t
