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Posts tagged with "Wallet"

Hands-on With France’s Digital ID App on the iPhone: Not as Digital as Digital Can Be

Almost three years ago now, Apple announced that it would support adding state IDs and driver’s licenses to the Wallet app on the iPhone and the Apple Watch, with the feature first rolling out to a handful of US states. Today, digital IDs in Wallet still haven’t materialized in most of the states that committed to support the feature back in 2021, and Apple hasn’t announced any expansion of the feature beyond the US.

Here in France, the government has long pledged to offer the ability to get a digital ID for all holders of the redesigned national identity card that started rolling out in 2021. The new ID card format was to be smaller than the old one (finally reaching the size of any standard credit card), but more importantly, it would feature an RFID chip that would enable contactless interactivity with, say, a dedicated terminal or any NFC-enabled smartphone. Fast-forward to today, and with this new ID card now widely in the hands of French citizens, France’s government has released France Identité, an app that allows any French ID card holder to get a digital version of their ID or driver’s license on their smartphone.

While the app was publicly made available earlier this year on iOS and Android, I have been using the beta for close to a full year now. France Identité is a strange, frustrating mix of physical and digital that says a lot about the privacy concerns and technical issues that inevitably get raised when a state wants to take their IDs digital.

Let’s take a look at the app, what it can do, and how it differs from Apple’s vision for digital IDs.

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Demystifying Digital Wallets and Apple Pay→

One of the many allegations in the Department of Justice’s antitrust complaint against Apple is that Apple stifles competition by:

effectively block[ing] third-party developers from creating digital wallets on the iPhone with tap-to-pay functionality, which is an important feature of a digital wallet for smartphones. As a result, Apple maintains complete control over how users make tap-to-pay payments with their iPhone. Apple also deprives users of the benefits and innovations third-party wallets would provide so that it can protect “Apple’s most important and successful business, iPhone.”

(DOJ Complaint at ¶ 104).

In a post a couple of days ago, John Gruber suggested that the DOJ is off-base because he doubted banks or other credit card companies would obfuscate credit card numbers the way Apple does. In fact, as Matt Birchler, who works in the payments industry, explains, many U.S. banks and other companies do (or did) the same thing, using something called a DPAN:

It’s notable that it’s called a DPAN and not “the Apple Pay number” – it’s a generic term, and that’s because this is a standard feature of digital wallets everywhere, not just Apple Pay. Google Pay and Samsung Pay are the biggest other digital wallets in the U.S. and they both do exactly the same thing. While it’s not technically using a DPAN since the payment runs through different companies, Amazon Pay and Shop Pay buttons also obscure the actual FPAN (full card number) from merchants.

And it’s not just tech companies using DPANs – U.S. banks do too:

Numerous banks from Walls Fargo to Chase to Bank of America have (or had) digital wallets, all of which used DPANs to protect your plain text account number. Paze is what a few big U.S. banks use today and it of course uses DPANs as well.

It’s not surprising that there is confusion about Apple Pay. Apple doesn’t tell customers about DPANs. Instead, the company uses its unique mix of hardware, software, and excellent marketing to make its payment system feel like magic.

In addition to DPANs, Birchler covers:

  • The differences between FPANs and DPANs
  • The extent to which you can be tracked using your Apple Pay purchase history
  • How much personal data Apple Pay transmits to merchants

The post is an excellent read that dispels common myths and confusion about Apple Pay clearly and concisely. It’s the exact kind of explanation of the industries Apple is accused of monopolizing that I hope we see more of as the DOJ’s lawsuit proceeds.

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FinanceKit Opens Real-Time Apple Card, Apple Cash, and Apple Savings Transaction Data to Third-Party Apps→

Ivan Mehta, writing for TechCrunch:

Apple’s iOS 17.4 update is primarily about adapting iOS to EU’s Digital Market Act Regulation. But the company has also released a new API called FinanceKit that lets developers fetch transactions and balance information from Apple Card, Apple Cash, and Savings with Apple.

If you use an Apple Card and a budgeting and financial tracking app, you’ll know why this is a big deal. I’ve been tracking my expenses with Copilot for over a year now, and I was pleased to see in Mehta’s story that Copilot, along with YNAB, Monarch, have teamed up with Apple to be the first third-party apps to use FinanceKit.

Before FinanceKit, I could only track my Apple Card expenses by importing a CSV file of my transactions one time each month when a new statement appeared in the Wallet app. Not only was that laborious, but it defeated the purpose of an app like Copilot, which otherwise lets you see where you stand with your budget in real-time. The process was such a bad experience that I used my Apple Card a lot less than I would have otherwise. Now, those Apple Card transactions will be recorded in Copilot, YNAB, and Monarch as they’re made, just like any other credit card.

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