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Apple joins the NFC party, providing iOS developers the ability to read NFC tags
- dep_b 9y agoSome example code: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44380305/ios-11-core-nfc-any-sample-code https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44380305/ios-11-core-nfc...
- Fej 9y agoWhat took so long?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- astrodust 9y agoStandards, plus thinking Low-Power BlueTooth might supplant it.
- spilk 9y agoAnd probably paranoia that it would interfere with Apple Pay
- djrogers 9y agoApple Pay uses NFC - how would it interfere?
- giobox 9y agoI suspect spilk is referring to concerns Apple will probably have had internally about rival payment platforms using the iPhone NFC hardware to process payments instead of Apple Pay. I'd be extremely surprised if debates about this didn't come up when they were deciding how to build the public API for the feature, and is probably a huge factor in the API being read only and not supporting card emulation, for now.
- giobox 9y agoI'd almost completely forgotten Apple tried to push their iBeacon standard, arguably in competition to NFC in many ways. If I'm honest, my expectations for NFC lighting the world on fire with iOS support have been severely tempered by the huge number of articles/businesses/startups that proclaimed iBeacons where the next big thing. I've still never encountered them in the wild outside of Apple stores or friends who bought iBeacon hardware for hacking personal projects. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBeacon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBeacon
- MBCook 9y agoSome core group obviously cared enough Apple decided it was in their interest. I'd be interested in knowing who it was. Option 2: they plan to start using it themselves in future products for pairing instead/with BTLE or maybe for some sort of in-store display.
- BillinghamJ 9y agoIs there some kind of example app I can sideload onto my iPhone which will just detect and scan any/all NFC tags and display the data to me?
- wnevets 9y agousers in the year 2011 will be so happy
- flax 9y agoWonderful. Now, how many more years before they get write access? The "C" is for "communication".
- abritinthebay 9y agotechnically communication can be one way.
- Analemma_ 9y agoThis is awesome! But why am I hearing about it from IBM instead of Apple?
- dep_b 9y agoToo much stuff to show yesterday I guess.
- dang 9y agoIt did come up yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14491686 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14491686. One downside of the annual announcement-day extravaganzas the big tech cos all do is that there is only enough space on HN's front page for the 3 or 4 biggest announcements, at most. Even then a lot of users get irritated by how much Apple/Microsoft/Google/whatever is appearing on conference day.
- sigspec 9y agoWe had an instance where we needed to read NFC tags and had to use a third party sled. This would have helped a ton.
- martinald 9y agoIs this comparable to NFC support on Android or is it a more limited subset? Can it do equivalent ISO 14443?
- jayd16 9y agoLooks like its only read support.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- johansch 9y agoThese guys have done some initial research on what exactly this entails: https://gototags.com/blog/apple-ios-11-supports-reading-nfc-tags-iphone-7-iphone-8-core-nfc/ https://gototags.com/blog/apple-ios-11-supports-reading-nfc-...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- givinguflac 9y agoNeat, but I've yet to see a single NFC use case that gets me anywhere near as excited as this author. Amiibo is a cool concept but obviously limited. I've used some writable tags for android settings changes and such years ago, but it just doesn't seem useful to me. Anyone know a killer use case I'm missing here?
- MikeKusold 9y agoThe Yubikey NEO is the only NFC device that ever got me excited. It'd be nice to be able to store all my TOTP tokens on the device instead of the phone. Also, signing/encrypting text with PGP from the yubikey.
- hdhzy 9y agoSadly there is no NFC token that supports 4096 bit RSA keys (I'm not even talking about EC keys). Fidesmo also has support for PGP/U2F over NFC.
- brians 9y agoThat's okay. RSA-4096 is suitable for long term secrets, but we're talking about authentication: typically signing short challenges, or DH key shares, for immediate verification. The requirements for that application are much lighter.
- hdhzy 9y agoHow do you authenticate through NFC PGP on Android? Is that something specific to your company or is there a public app that you're using?
- xorcist 9y agoYou can use something called Openkeychain on Android. It uses NFC Yubikeys for both PGP and SSH. Regarding your 4096 bit requirements, normally when you have those security requirements you would keep that key offline and use shorter lived 2048 bit keys for actual authentication. There is 4096 bit support with Yubikey 4 which unfortunately isn't offered with NFC.
- dogecoinbase 9y agoOh nice. Need to test if it will support NFC-based Yubikeys.
- Kipters 9y agoAt first I was excited, but then I read the docs: > Read only > Only supports NDEF formatted tags > Available only on iPhone 7 and newer Basically, this is even more crippled than what WP 8.0 did five years ago (and back then I thought it was too crippled to be useful)
- 0x0 9y agoI wonder if there is any technical reason for requiring iPhone 7. I thought iPhone 6 and iPhone 6s also had some kind of NFC hardware present to support Apple Pay.
- adambrenecki 9y agoIIRC, because the payment terminals have their own power source, previous iPhone generations lacked the induction coils necessary to support passive NFC tags. Presumably they were added to the iPhone 7?
- MBCook 9y agoIt could also be some kind of security thing where the 7 was designed to be able to have 3rd party access where the 6/6s would have required the secure enclave to do something risky. Pure guess.
- ClassyJacket 9y agoWell, the Secure Enclave is in every device with a TouchID, so that's the iPhone 5S and newer.
- MBCook 9y agoRight but I mean that perhaps in the iPhone 7 they somehow rejiggered the SE interface in anticipation of doing this. That way the 7 hardware has a very secure way to do this where as since it wasn't planned in the older phones it might not be secure if they tried to provide access from user software. Maybe the NFC reader is attached to a different chip in the 7 that makes this easier/secure than in the older phones.
- wastedhours 9y agoThis opens up quite a few interesting ideas in the real world gaming arena. I know it's been possible with Android, but cross platform real world treasure hunt games are something I've thought a lot about, and this could make it easier than having to do GPS bounding or use BLE.
- ponco 9y agoIf anyone's wondering, the API is significantly more limited than the Android NFC API (which having used it extensively over the last 2 years I can say is very pleasant). Still, it's better than nothing and it represents a huge opportunity for NFC tag providers (where I work). We've been waiting for this for about 4 years.
- melias 9y agoI've been waiting for Apple to open up their NFC hardware too. I'm working on a closed loop payment app (https://www.loopz.io https://www.loopz.io) that uses NFC and Apple's lockdown has been frustrating since the first question I get when showing the app is; does it work on iOS? This is the first step in them allowing access to the NFC chip hopefully. The chip in iPhone 6 and 7 supports writing to tags (which I need for my app) but it's not exposed through the API's at the moment. Android has allowed this since Gingerbread.
- Hippocrates1 9y agolooking at the documentation, I'm not able to see if the API allows for even read/write of direct links. Is that the case?
- ponco 9y agoThere is no support for writing direct links as you say, but if the data is a standard NDEF URI then I believe the NFCReaderSession will return the NDEFMessage objects (code example https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44415442/nfc-tags-not-detected-corenfc https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44415442/nfc-tags-not-de...)
- curryhowardiso 9y agoThis is potentially huge news - given that Apple just fought (and won) an antitrust/anti competition lawsuit in Australia in respect of not allowing Australian banks to use this NFC API! http://registers.accc.gov.au/content/index.phtml/itemId/1197444/fromItemId/401858 http://registers.accc.gov.au/content/index.phtml/itemId/1197... Edit: pulled the trigger on this comment too soon - it appears that the API will only support "reader mode" which is not what the main subject of the litigation was about - the banks wanted a 'total' (for want of a better word) public access API.
- abalone 9y agoI can't tell from the docs.. Does it actually allow your app to wake up in response to scanning tags? Or does it merely allow your active app to fire up the NFC reader?
- dingo_bat 9y agoThat's not the NFC party most people are attending. For me the most common use of NFC is to automatically pair/turn on my headphones and my portable speaker.
- xor1 9y agoStarted looking at the author's patents out of curiosity. http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.html&r=0&p=1&f=S&l=50&Query=IN%2FLisa+and+Seacat%0D%0A&d=PG01 http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=... A computer receives user preferences. The computer receives a document, wherein the document includes an image. The computer determines that the image contains embedded text. The computer determines that the embedded text does not satisfy the received user preferences. The computer modifies the embedded text to satisfy user preferences. Is this stuff actually enforceable? As in, could I, with adequate legal sources, actually get companies and individuals to pay me money for something as generic as "Text resizing within an embedded image", without actually implementing it (whether it be stand-alone code or within some sort of application)? Is Apple shelling out cash to IBM for the privilege of autoresizing labels?
- xorcist 9y agoWelcome to Marshall, Texas!
- parmesan 9y agoI like this one: http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.html&r=31&p=1&f=G&l=50&d=PG01&S1=(Lisa.IN.+AND+Seacat)&OS=IN/Lisa+and+Seacat&RS=(IN/Lisa+AND+Seacat) http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=... "[...] approaches for preventing an accidental termination of a phone call session.". The patent actually covers the event of when a user: 1) is in a call 2) taps dismiss 3) phone decide to dismiss or continue because [wildcard] reason. So the functionality in my Samsung that "decide" whether to ignore or continue when I tap dismiss with my chin is patented, cool.